Our Literal Speed

(since 2006)

The collective Our Literal Speed (OLS) is difficult to pin down: it has described itself alternately as a “media opera/textual archive,” a “discursive laboratory,” an “administrative Gesamtkunstwerk,” and a “live theory installation.” For OLS, discussion and critique are acts of aesthetic creation. Comprised of art historian-artists, the collective intends to dissolve the line between art, education, and politics in the vein of 1960s radicalism and the tradition of Happenings and Fluxus events. Their 2014–15 Late Obama Trilogy, for example, a series of videos about the politics of exhibition-making under neoliberalism, is at once a performance, a political debate, and an academic discussion. Chicago has been a key location for OLS activities. They have organized conferences and events at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Art Institute, the Renaissance Society, and Northwestern and DePaul Universities, with contributions from major figures in the Chicago art community, including Tania Bruguera, Zach Cahill, Darby English, Theaster Gates, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Christine Mehring, and WJT Mitchell.