A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Daniel Merkle

Assistant Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory and Criticism (2003). BA, 1998, University of Rhode Island; MFA, 2001, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Screenings: Archive Kabinett, Berlin; Aubin Gallery, London; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago. Performances: General Public Collective, Indianapolis; The Hideout, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Learning Machine, Chicago; Abbey Pub, Chicago; Circuit, Chicago; Reversible Eye, Chicago; Magic Inc, Chicago; Big Forever, Chicago; Templehead, Chicago; Captain Curt’s BBQ Shazzam, Chicago.

Personal Statement

I teach humanities-based global art history survey, film studies, and performance art history. My work in film, video, sound, and performance is often in collaboration and is usually created under a pseudonym. I use aliases. Some might say "personas" or "alter egos" or "pen names" or "doing business as"... It's not new and especially not today, with multiplicity of identity as the norm—at least in our first world, social media-1950's-throwback country. How many lives does everyone lead? Real? Virtual? Inside/Outside?

Under my own name I secretly edit and consult.

As Thoren Lang I collaborate with Brandon Doherty, doing sound and co-editing his films/videos. Thoren Lang also works with Chicago performance collaborative Conclusionary Practices, founded by sculptor Kelly Lesniak and featuring poet Mike Booker. And he makes pieces for Vic Ward, who is a performer only. Occasionally Thoren works with The _____ "Actress", a core character who arrived in the beginning of 2012. The _____ "Actress" also works with Conclusionary Practices, most often as The High Priestess Machine.

Current Interests

Living Inside/Outside, René Girard, Julian Jaynes, aggressive mimicry and/or ritual sacrifice impersonation...

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Art has been many things to many people. This class introduces students to the history of art and art-like things on Earth from prehistory to ca. 1800 CE. It covers canonical examples from older scholarship alongside works and contexts emerging in recent art histories. Students will learn to perform basic art historical analysis and research, and the course will prepare them to form personal art histories, applying such art histories to their own work. The course surveys historical art in a global scope, from the beginnings of known culture to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It introduces students to a range of interdisciplinary frameworks for parsing the production, reception, and conceptualization of art. And it challenges students to think about the relationships between past and present, highlighting how later artists and cultures have engaged earlier art and history. There is a small amount of required reading each week-on average about 20 pages. Written work includes weekly reading responses, two in-class quizzes, an annotated bibliography project, and a take-home final exam.

Class Number

1101

Credits

3

Description

This course surveys performance as art throughout the Modern and Postmodern periods?including contemporary and non-Western incarnations?and covers roughly the last one hundred fifty years. Areas of historical and theoretical focus include the philosophy of performance, ethnography, feminism, and the interface of performance with film, video, dance, sculpture, theater, technology, and popular culture. Movements like Futurism, Dada, and Fluxus are explored alongside themes like endurance, performance in everyday life, the culture wars and censorship, performance and AIDS, and postcolonial uses of performance. Key figures such as Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic are analyzed through comparison of documentaries about their work. Any number of seminal performance pieces are screened, including ones by Yoko Ono, Linda Montano, Diamanda Galas, Guillermo Gomez-Pe?a & Coco Fusco, and Anna Deavere Smith. Further historical context comes from essays and movies about AIDS activism and Punk & New Wave. Readings include primary sources, artist interviews, C. Carr's reviews, and noted works in Performance Studies from Richard Schechner, Peggy Phelan, Amelia Jones, and others. Students will attend two performances and write reviews, an annotated bibliography assignment provides opportunity to explore historical and non-western performance topics, and there will be much discussion.

Class Number

1058

Credits

3