Monica Steinberg, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Secret: George Herms and Clandestine Operations

Monica Steinberg, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Does the designation of something as “secret” simply establish a barrier of knowledge, or does such terminology work to increase one’s desire to know that which is concealed? George Herms’s Secret Exhibition of 1957, which included various assembled artworks, was installed amongst a row of demolished buildings in Hermosa Beach, California. Visited by a handful of people, the exhibition served as a public announcement of a clandestine operation. In the midst of the Cold War, Herms’s assembled objects and projects enacted under various pseudonyms, played between the tensions of public and private, and wrested in the space between concealment and disclosure.

Respondent: Sandra Zalman, University of Houston