In December of 2012 I was contacted by Buck Wanner of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University to contribute a piece to READING, a zine accompanying the American Realness Festival. American Realness is a festival of performance art and dance in New York City.

Specifically, I was asked to write a companion piece to performance artist Neal Medlyn’s “Wicked Clown Love,” the final show in his series exploring music fandom. After speaking with Buck and Neal, and seeing the show, I wrote an essay entitled, “A pure object, a spectacle, a clown…”  which discusses the relation of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies to the fan culture surrounding horror-rap group Insane Clown Posse, and the way that Medlyn’s piece interrupts the process of exoticisation that Barthes describes.

The article was re-published in arts and journal publication CultureBot, and is available for review there.