Sharon Hayes: There's So Much I Want to Say to You

Softcover | 22.96 x 0.97 x 27.89 cm | 88 pp

Yale University Press | 2012 | 9780300180374

In her performances, videos, and installations, Sharon Hayes (b. 1970) explores the nexus between politics, history, speech, and desire. Her works modify or appropriate the language and tools of political dissent, creating unexpected affinities between important historical events and the present.

Highlighted in this volume is the video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds Number 13, 16, 20 & 29 (2003) - a work in which Hayes memorised the famous taped speeches by Patty Hearst and her kidnappers, the leftist radical group the Symbionese Liberation Army, and then reads them to an audience who corrects her mistakes. It is in these slippages between memory and history that the meaning of Hayes' work resides.

There's So Much I Want to Say to You also includes a group of site-specific works that address the Whitney Museum's role in the historic development of process-based, performative art and its engagement with politics that took place the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book also features original contributions from Hayes that provide insight into the complex motivations and development of her projects.

Scholarship by Chrissie Iles contextualises Hayes's work in the history of political discourse by examining and explaining her sources of inspiration. Beautiful images of projects spanning the artist's career are presented in conjunction with photographs and texts from these historical events.