G. Roger Denson is an American art critic, theoretician, novelist, and curator. A regular contributor to Huffington Post, his writings have also appeared in such international publications as Art in America

Art in America

Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...

, Parkett

Parkett

-Publication:Published three times per year in English and German by its publishing house in Zurich, Switzerland, with an additional editorial office in New York, Parkett has a circulation of 12,000 and is read by some 30,000 readers in 40 countries, one third of them in North...

, Artscribe

Artscribe

Artscribe , titled Artscribe International from 1985, is a defunct British contemporary art magazine. It was notable for its commitment in the late 1970s and early 1980s to abstract art, and for giving popular art critic Matthew Collings his first break into contemporary art.-Founding and early...

 International, Flash Art, Bijutsu Techo, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Artbyte, Arts Magazine, Contemporanea, Tema Celeste, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Trans>Arts, Culture,Media, The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

and Journal of Contemporary Art. He has published criticism and commentary on such international artists as Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick

Terrence Frederick Malick is a U.S. film director, screenwriter, and producer. In a career spanning almost four decades, Malick has directed five feature films....

, Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto , born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, USA. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.-Life and works:Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in...

, Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint...

, Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist who has become notorious through his photos of corpses and his use of feces and bodily fluids in his work, notably his controversial work "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported...

, Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...

, Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Charlesworth is a well-known American conceptual artist and photographer. She was born in East Orange, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1969 and now lives in New York City...

, Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...

, Jack Smith

Jack Smith

-In sport:*Jack Smith , 19th century footballer in 1892–1895*Jack Smith , English player with Wolverhampton Wanderers and others* Jack Smith , English international footballer...

, Philip Taaffe

Philip Taaffe

Philip Taaffe is an American artistTaaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and studied at the Cooper Union in New York, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977....

, Pat Steir

Pat Steir

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker.-Education:Steir was born in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, and currently lives in New York City. She attended the Pratt Institute in New York from 1956 to 1958, and Boston University College of Fine Arts from 1958 to 1960. She then returned to Pratt,...

, Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.-Background:Neshat's parents were upper middle-class...

, Marilyn Minter

Marilyn Minter

Marilyn Minter is an American artist currently living and working in New York City. Marilyn Minter has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, the Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Les Rencontres d'Arles festival in 2007,...

, Renée Green

Renee Green

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her pluralistic practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, architecture, photography, prints, video, film, websites, and sound, which normally converge in highly layered and complex installations...

, John Miller, Robert Longo

Robert Longo

Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...

, Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton is a contemporary artist living in Bali. A mixed-media artist, Bickerton often combines both photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found object assemblages...

, Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake is an artist whose mixed-media work has been variously described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender....

, Tishan Hsu, Liz Larner, Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George

Gilbert & George are two artists who work together as a collaborative duo. Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore have become famous for their distinctive, highly formal appearance and manner and their brightly coloured graphic-style photo-based artworks.-Early life:Gilbert Proesch was...

, Barbara Ess, Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He is best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lives and works in New York.-Early life and career:...

, Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.-Early life and career:...

, General Idea

General Idea

General Idea was a collective of three Canadian artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, who were active from 1967 to 1994.As pioneers of early conceptual and media-based art, their collaboration became a model for artist-initiated activities and continues to be a prominent influence on...

, Jules Olitski

Jules Olitski

Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...

, Lydia Dona, Maura Sheehan, Jimmy De Sana

Jimmy De Sana

Jimmy De Sana was an American artist, and a key figure in the East Village punk art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. His photography has been described as "anti-art" in its approach to capturing images of the human body, in a manner ranging from "savagely explicit to purely symbolic"., William S...

, Dan Graham

Dan Graham

Dan Graham , is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery....

, and Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager is an American painter, illustrator and sculptor, born in 1923 in Washington, D.C.. Artschwager is best known for his stylistic independence; although he has associations with the Pop Art movement, Conceptual art and Minimalism....

.

Denson has written on the criticism of Thomas McEvilley

Thomas McEvilley

Thomas McEvilley is an American art critic, poet, novelist and scholar, who was a distinguisted lecturer in art history at Rice University and founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.-Biography:Thomas McEvilley studied...

 (with republished essays by McEvilley) in Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism, currently issued by Routledge, (originally Gordon & Breach). Denson’s monographs and catalogues include Dennis Oppenheim, (Fundacao De Serralves, Portugal); Hunter Reynolds: Memento Mori, Memoriter, (Trinitatiskirche, Cologne); Michael Young: Predella of Difference, (Blum Helman, New York). And in the book by Robert Morris (artist)

Robert Morris (artist)

Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...

, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (October Books, MIT Press), Denson has contributed to the chapter, “Robert Morris Replies to Roger Denson (Or Is That a Mouse in My Paragon?) ”.

Toward A Nomadic Criticism

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Denson reached beyond conventional art criticism to establish a reputation as a nomadic ideologist. As such, he developed an approach toward the criticism of art that matches the concerns of his subjects. He does this by entering into the ideological models presented to the viewer by an artist rather than carrying with him some pre-established criteria that is projected onto all art. Among the philosophical issues Denson addresses are those of pragmatism, historicism, cultural relativism, and mythopoetics, all of which are ideologically suited to dismantling the need for a master narrative or identity. In so doing, he effectively dismantles cultural, national, racial, sexual, and gender biases in the critique of art and culture.

Among Denson's most influential essays count "Going Back to Start, Perpetually: Playing the Nomadic Game in the Critical Reception of Art," which first appeared in Parkett issue #40/41, 1994, (in English and German) and was republished (in Spanish) in El reverso de la diferencia, Caracas, 2000. It is here that Denson states, "To a great degree the nomad is to late twentieth-century intellectuals what the noble savage was to Enlightenment writers like John Dryden

John Dryden

John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He was made Poet...

, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...

, Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

, and François-René de Chateaubriand

François-René de Chateaubriand

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.-Early life and exile:...

. I write this not to debunk the nomadic model in postmodern culture, but to stress how some intellectuals (I think especially of Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

 and Félix Guattari

Félix Guattari

Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...

) have romanticized a pragmatic, decentered, migrant existence as a dissident response to global institutions and technologies that are becoming increasingly centralized and fortified at their boundaries." This is despite, as Denson argues, there being "a host of global conditions in the world that are adversarial to the spread of nomadic methods of conceptualization, judgment, and discourse, whether in reference to the shifting significations that come with cross-cultural or multicultural convergence, or the multiplicity of conceptual models that breed with today's radical skepticism, deconstructive suspension and deferral of belief, and provisional and pragmatic views of discourse and political action. The nomadic tendency, then, is the intellectual's game, though it is also at work in the mainstreams of postindustrial nations ... the willed and pragmatic response to diversity and displacement that leads to prosperous and protean results." In the end, Denson concludes, "No doubt a kind of conceptual and cultural nomadism has been mediated for centralized and static populations through journalism, network and cable television, cinema, the internet, and virtual reality. From here one can distinguish what we mean anthropologically by "nomadic"—from our metaphorical usage of it critically and theoretically to describe the shiftings and migrations occurring in a global civilization. ...Paradoxically, this logic proceeds to make the couch potato or armchair traveller a potentially formidable player of nomadism."

Expanding on this notion a year later in Migrations of the Real and the Ideal: Exploring a Nomadic Criticism, (published in the premiere issue of Trans>Arts, Culture, Media), Denson writes: "Because there are so many models of reality and identity existing simultaneously, because there are so many societies and cultures converging in a global community, because discourse is being negotiated among them, and because we are recognizing multiple histories of the world, we require a critical attitude that rides with the shifts in civilization's discourse. The best of today's critics are ready to visit the models of any given community—ideological, spiritual, political, economic, technological, scientific, aesthetic—at any given time without obstructing communication and insinuating personal models on them. This does not mean that we must have expertise in those models or even accept them personally, but we must be ready to defer and then adapt all personal criteria responsively in acknowledgement of the world's diversity. ...When two or more ideas conflict, the temptation often is to reconcile them. Nomadic criticism doesn’t require this. We needn’t reconcile an idea to any other, including the model of nomadism. We can just move among them, using them when we need to, putting them on hold when we don’t. The nomadic ideal also doesn’t position two or more models in opposition. We think only of two or more ideas as being opposed if we think we hold a more comprehensive, singular, or foundational truth; nomadism holds that there are only shifting and contingent models that are as temporally relative as the condition among individuals, communities, and environments that produce them."

In 1996, Denson gives example of the kind of nomadic criticism he has been referring to. In Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism, Denson writes of the art critic Thomas McEvilley

Thomas McEvilley

Thomas McEvilley is an American art critic, poet, novelist and scholar, who was a distinguisted lecturer in art history at Rice University and founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.-Biography:Thomas McEvilley studied...

. "Through his reference to various models around the world, readers get an idea of how much more liberating it is to capaciously represent and experience the world's heterogeneity. ...Globalism and diversity, as McEvilley represents them, have come to replace the esteem of universality. Globalism, in contrast to universalism, compels cooperation and exchange from multiple sources (cultures and geographies) without posing any one as primary; it is the composition or network potentially encompassing all diversity without imposing a unity or other singular principle on it."

Denson exemplifies this nomadic relativism when examining the intersection of art and politics in such publications as Foreign Affairs: Conflicts in the Global Village—Central America, Middle East, South Africa, (with Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

, Edward Said

Edward Said

Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

, Geno Rodriguez, and Eqbal Ahmed), and Occupation and Resistance, about the art and artists reflecting on and participating in the Palestinian First Intifada

First Intifada

The First Intifada was a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The uprising began in the Jabalia refugee camp and quickly spread throughout Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem....

.

The Authoring of Authority

Underpinning Denson’s nomadic approach to art and criticism and tangential to his relativism is his view on the authority implicit in all authorship. “Authoring Authority in the Rhetoric of Art Criticism" is an essay Denson contributed to a collection of essays by contemporary art critics centered around the issue of Cultural Permissions. In this essay Denson elaborates on the authority granted authors in contemporary society despite the appearance (really a very modern assumption) that authorship itself has such authority implicit within it when in reality it does not. Denson finds the evidence for the evolution of our widespread misperception of an author's authority in the etymology of our language. “Thought, in its very formation, reinforces its own power of persuasion in the languages it generates and, in turn, is generated by. The Latin etymologies of author, (auctor: originator, promoter) and authority (autorititat: opinion, decision)" indicate that, although the Bronze and Iron Age monarchal and priestly authors of official, self-aggrandizing narratives decreed writing to possess an historically absolute authority, this was not the belief system conveyed by the architects of written language. Eytymology, Denson holds, provides evidence that writing was conceived as, if not arbitrary narratives, then certainly as no more than narratives relative to an author’s life conditions. It was only after the invention of movable type and the mass circulation of texts saturated cultural consciousness that the now printed and ubiquitously distributed opinion of an author became illusionistically equated with its authority. "He whose opinion becomes popularly received must hold autonomy of will" became a popular faith coursing through secular and religious affairs. "Thus evolves the will to power that Nietzsche saw driving all human behavior," Denson writes. "When entering public discourse, the will to power, the self (the auto, the author) reifies itself over time and with material and linguistic (some might say metaphysical) persuasions, establishes itself as a worldly authority, an authority of opinion that is shared or widely consented to. For the rhetoric of a skilled author can summon a single, common mind from among the masses, especially those prone to give up their own points of view for a slogan or method.”

Denson goes on to demonstrate that the autonomy of the will is not itself sanctioned by a public threatened by overt displays of power. Hence in democratic states the deferential nature of authorship is the author’s buffer with the public, even as it sedates the reader's skepticism in the author. The effect is the authority conferred on authors by the public is largely conferred on those who successfully appeal to prior authorities, institutions, and ideas already enjoying some measure of support at least by the informed, reading public. Constructed in opposition to the ancient and long-running bias of logocentrism

Logocentrism

Logocentrism is a term coined by German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1920s. It refers to the tradition of "Western" science and philosophy that situates the logos, ‘the word’ or the ‘act of speech’, as epistemologically superior in a system, or structure, in which we may only know, or be...

, the privileging of the spoken word over writing presumed to be the foundation for authentic ideas, reason, and even reality, Denson’s authority of authorship is a model of the shifting but interlinking appeals made by an author to receive the reader’s consent. Such appeals by an author imply the authority of a text is often conferred more in deferring to prior models, institutions, and authorities, than to any force of reason or individual vision textually conveyed.

The obvious debts to and departures from the critiques of logocentrism by Ludwig Klages

Ludwig Klages

Ludwig Klages was a German philosopher, psychologist and a theoretician in the field of handwriting analysis.-Life:...

 and the Deconstruction

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

 of Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

 are immediately evident. But Denson also at once aligns with and disputes Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

' 1967 essay, The Death of the Author, which attributes the aura, politics, ethnicity, faith, and nationality of the author as having undue influence in the reception of a text. Similarly, Denson both concurs with and removes himself from Edward Said

Edward Said

Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

’s 1983 critique, The World, the Text, and the Critic, when he sites the "anterior restraints" of past writers as that which both anchors an author's authority in history and prompts the author's celebrity at least in contemporary society. But such anterior restraints, Denson points out, are also what prevent authors from seeing and reporting on the deeper and unmediated significance of events in the larger context of human affairs, especially if such affairs are introduced in new ways and fashions. It is in Denson's own borrowing from and simultaneous arguing with perceived authorities that he came to see that deference to prior citations and expertise is not only unavoidable, it is something imposed on the writer by the very conditions of textuality and discourse. Entirely social, writing must be derived from reading, and in public expressions, especially those of criticism and theory, a writer’s contribution has as much to do with channeling authors come and gone as it does in making unique contributions.

In this arena, the measure of consensus with which an author is greeted is in large part contingent on the degree to which the writer appeals to recognized authorities and ideas—those fashionable or relevant to the public—more than the merit of the idea itself. This isn’t to say that Denson doesn’t see creativity, and even glimmers of originality, everywhere in the history of authorship. Yet, however revolutionary a text is touted to be, Denson believes it must be anchored, however discreetly (and often covertly), to prior authorities, institutions, customs, even whims and fashions, otherwise its individualist insights will likely go unappreciated. Without appealing to political, religious, societal, economic, ethnic, or engendered identities—the appeals Klages, Derrida, Barthes, and Said critique—an author will be lost to posterity. In the new global arena of texts, the authors capable of making the greatest mark on civilization, Denson holds, are those conversant with the greatest array of authorities and vaunted ideas of the past, while being able to make the authority of the past appear new and relevant to the largest targeted public. It is up to the reading public to learn to be aware of, and whenever possible to discern, which anterior traditions, institutions, ideologies and esteemed figures an author defers to buttress her own authority before accepting that author as authoritative.

Early work

Before becoming a cultural critic, Denson helped to launch the careers of a number of young artists as well as to exhibit the work of several who are now internationally acclaimed. In the 1970s and 1980s, as a curator of painting, sculpture, photography, performance, dance, film, and video, he worked with such artists as Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...

, Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci

Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...

, Chris Burden

Chris Burden

Christopher "Chris" Burden is an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.-Education:Burden studied for his B.A...

, Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist, educator, writer, and former public servant. She describes her work, which includes "installations, video, and large-scale performances", as focusing on "social themes and urban issues." She also served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then...

, Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas

Born in 1936 in New York City, Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art and one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.She began her career in New York City as a sculptor...

, Steve Paxton

Steve Paxton

Steve Paxton is an experimental dancer and choreographer. His early background was in gymnastics while his later training included three years with Merce Cunningham and a year with José Limón. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, he performed works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown...

 and Dancers, Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown is a postmodernist American choreographer and dancer.Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and received a B.A. degree in dance from Mills College in 1958. Brown later received a D.F.A. from Bates College in 2000. For several summers she studied with Louis Horst at the American Dance...

 and Dancers, Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker.-Early life:Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island; his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1967...

, Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota

is a visual and performance artist born in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, in 1937. She studied sculpture at the Tokyo University of Education, and completed her studies at New York University and at the New School for Social Research in the early 1960s. She became vice chairman of the Fluxus...

, Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...

, Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...

, Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum, born in 1946 in New York ,USA, where she continues to live and work, uses video to reconstruct television imagery using as material such archetypal formats as quizzes, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her techniques involve the repetition of images and interruption of flow with...

, Gary Hill

Gary Hill

Gary Hill is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington.One of the pioneers of video art, Gary Hill has exhibited his video and video installations worldwide . He is represented by Donald Young Gallery of Chicago.An anthology on the work of Gary Hill by Robert C...

, Hollis Frampton

Hollis Frampton

Hollis Frampton was an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer/theoretician, and pioneer of digital art.-Early years:Frampton was born March 11, 1936 in Wooster, Ohio...

, Paul Sharits

Paul Sharits

Paul Jeffrey Sharits Paul Sharits was a visual artist, best known for his work in "experimental" or avant-garde filmmaking, particularly what became known as the Structural film movement, along with artists such as Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow.His film work primarily focused on...

, Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American film director. Her best-known films are the cult horror film Near Dark , the surfer/bank robbery action picture Point Break , the science fiction/film noir Strange Days , the historical/mystery film The Weight of Water and the war drama The Hurt Locker...

, Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...

, Douglas Dunn

Douglas Dunn

Douglas Eaglesham Dunn, OBE is a Scottish poet, academic, and critic. He currently lives in Scotland.-Background:Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire. He was educated at the Scottish School of Librarianship, and worked as a librarian before he started his studies in Hull...

 and Dancers, Lew Thomas, Gretchen Faust, Leon Golub

Leon Golub

Leon Golub was an American painter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his BA at the University of Chicago in 1942, his BFA and MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and 1950, respectively.He was married to and collaborated with the artist Nancy Spero...

, Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...

, Sandro Chia

Sandro Chia

Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor.A native of Florence, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Enzo Cucchi....

, Wolfgang Staehle

Wolfgang Staehle

Wolfgang Staehle is an early pioneer of net.art in the United States, known for his video streaming of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001.-Education:...

, Beth B and Scott B, Polly Apfelbaum, among numerous others. Denson curated primarily at Hallwalls

Hallwalls

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is a non-profit organization in Buffalo, N.Y. that showcases artists of diverse backgrounds in film, video, literature, music, performance, media and visual arts. Since its inception, Hallwalls has been dedicated to promoting artists from multiple backgrounds and...

, Buffalo, NY, but later was a guest curator with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Albright-Knox Art Gallery

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is an art museum located in Delaware Park in Buffalo, New York. The gallery is a major showplace for modern art and contemporary art. It is located directly across the street from Buffalo State College.-History:...

; A-Space, Toronto; The New Museum of Contemporary Art

New Museum of Contemporary Art

The New Museum, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to presenting contemporary art from around the world...

 ; The Alternative Museum

The Alternative Museum

The Alternative Museum was founded in 1975 by artists for artists and the broader New York City community in the United States. Its primary purpose was to present works of art created by artists of conscience through exhibitions of contemporary art, world music concerts, performances and panel...

; Abington Art Center

Abington Art Center

Abington Art Center, located in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia, PA is a non-collecting contemporary art museum with exhibition galleries and a sculpture park. Abington Art Center’s mission is to cultivate the power of the arts – inspiring individuals and strengthening community...

, Philadelphia; and various New York commercial galleries. Perhaps the exhibition for which he is best known as a curator is Poetic Injury: The Surrealist Legacy in Postmodern Photography, held at The Alternative Museum

The Alternative Museum

The Alternative Museum was founded in 1975 by artists for artists and the broader New York City community in the United States. Its primary purpose was to present works of art created by artists of conscience through exhibitions of contemporary art, world music concerts, performances and panel...

, with a catalogue and essays by Denson and Suzaan Boettger, and a preface by Rosalind Krauss.

Recent work

In 2004, Denson co-wrote and edited the performance script for Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty: Entertainment by Dan Graham

Dan Graham

Dan Graham , is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery....

 and Tony Oursler

Tony Oursler

Tony Oursler is a multimedia and installation artist.- Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989:Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special...

, performed at Art Basel Miami Beach; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Vienna; and The Walker Art Center

Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...

, Minneapolis, 2004–05. A film montage of the performance made by Tony Oursler was installed at the Whitney Biennial 2006, Whitney Museum of Art in New York.

From 2005 to 2008, Denson developed and taught MFA courses in art criticism and writing at New York's School of Visual Arts

School of Visual Arts

The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...

. He claimed on the SVA website that his courses were especially designed to introduce students to the diverse art, thought, and polity reflective of global history and contemporary events. Such exposure to the world at large should precede specialized study of aesthetic, social, and political theories, he holds, so that each individual is equipped with the intellectual and emotional counterweights required to keep from being unduly seduced by attractive, but myopic world views and paradigms.

In 2010, Denson personified nomadic diversity in his novel, Voice of Force (published with Oracle Press) not only in his characters, but by relinquishing the author’s godlike perspective and voice and replacing it with narration by multiple voices loudly expressing contrasting points of view.