Join us at Printed Matter Chelsea for the US launch of What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy by Larne Abse Gogarty. On the occasion of the launch, Larne will joined in conversation by writer and editor Ciarán Finlayson.

Written by Larne Abse Gogarty in the wake of the far-right populist turn in Europe, the US, and beyond, What We Do Is Secret addresses aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy. This inquiry takes shape across chapters on the politics of post-internet art aesthetics; the sublime and possessive individualism in recent ‘critical’ art; Cady Noland’s security fences, and silkscreens of the Symbionese Liberation Army; and mutuality, secrecy, and improvisation in the work of Ima-Abasi Okon.

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. Alongside What We Do Is Secret, she is the author of Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Brill, 2021) and has published in journals and magazines, including Art Monthly, New Socialist, Tate Papers, Third Text, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. In 2020 she co-edited with Andrew Hemingway a special issue on ‘Keywords for Marxist Art History’ of the journal Kunst und Politik. She is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. He is the author of Perpetual Slavery (Floating Opera, 2023) and the managing editor of Blank Forms.

Cover artwork:
Caspar Heinemann
Glorie #2
2022
Cardboard, acrylic, tape, string, wood, Huberd’s shoe grease
11 x 23 x 12 cm
Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London