Event Details

This first monograph on artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller focuses on a single sculpture by the artist: Michael in Black (2018). This book brings together a cohort of writers and other artists through newly commissioned texts and works for the page, as well as republished texts and images that exist as their own whole. Some texts hinge on the sculpture, others are tangents. The books texts and images build on each other, functioning as a prism for the publication's subject.

Michael in Black (2018) is a bronze cast of Michael Jackson's kneeling figure, poured from a mold made directly from his body around 1986. This talismanic object comprises myriad aspects of celebrity and image: the objecthood of the performer, the potency and perversity of objects, death, and grief. This sculpture is an outlier in Miller's work, though it excavates some concerns she has similarly articulated in moving image: her recurring interest in the self-performance of her film subjects; the dehumanizing effects of the mass gaze; the celebrity as a host object for contemporary projections; the tactility of film, the sculptural qualities of editing; and the potential for self storytelling to reconstitute an individual's wholeness.

"Show Notes"

Nicole Miller referenced several artists during her Wednesday talk. Here's a list of a few:

• Todd Gray, visual artist; a crowd photograph from his 2009 book Michael Jackson: Before He Was King appears on page 94 of Michael in Black. 
• Slauson Malone, Hamza Walker, and Harmony Holiday, who each offered performance interventions to celebrate Michael in Black's launch in October at the Los Angeles Palace Theatre.
• Mark Lecky whose work deals in "pop culture, technology and memory," through the mediums of "sculpture, film, sound and performance."
• The late writer, critic, and musician Greg Tate whose new text is also featured on page 61 through 68 of Michael in Black.