Love meetings: impersonality and intimacy in the art of Sharon Hayes

The study that follows establishes the work of contemporary artist Sharon Hayes as critically engaged with some of modern art’s central concerns. Hayes’s art asserts itself principally in terms of vying to produce a field of relations directed toward creating collective form, and it explores varied tones, performances, and uses of language as the substantive sources of connection. Sharon Hayes’s art speaks to possibilities of a creating a connected public in what is increasingly understood as a sustained state of crisis that characterizes and consumes living in the contemporary world. It asks how best to use art’s concrete signs in their specificity and abstraction to speak to or construct this public, and it considers whether beings in the present can be productively optimistic or inevitably remain situated in loss and longing. Some viewers have interpreted Hayes’s body of work as in essence about failure. Developing this project means opening up the possibility that along with showing a viewer failure, Hayes also offers forms that make connectivity and possibility available. In this study I will investigate how Hayes’s art engages art’s audience with the immediacy of the intimate language found in what the artist terms “love addresses.” With its simultaneous presentation of these and universalizing aesthetic forms that register modernist aspirations to make collective social form, such art also explores how the conditions for publicness can be developed in the present.