11.06. – 12.06.2026 | Talk and workshop
John Miller: Dead or Alive | The Body as Site, The Body in Public
DEAD OR ALIVE
Talk
John Miller’s mannequin works cover a charged terrain where an object designed for commercial display becomes a site of psychic instability. Drawn from his long-standing engagement with commodity culture, these figures—straight out of retail store windows—stage the human form as both inviting and estranged. Their blank physiognomies and generic bodies do not simply mimic life; they expose its reduction to a reproducible image, a script already written by the logic of consumption. In this sense, Miller’s mannequins are less representations of people than indices of a social condition in which subjectivity is formed through interpolation.
Miller’s mannequins involve “playing with dead things,” as his friend Mike Kelley once put it, namely playing with things that seem to recall the body, even as they deny it. Their familiarity is excessive, overdetermined by cultural codes, and it is this overfamiliarity that produces unease. As Sigmund Freud suggested, the uncanny arises when something once known returns in estranged form, “a hidden, familiar thing… that has undergone repression and then emerged.” Miller underscores the social and economic conditions that give rise to these forms. His mannequins are not haunted relics so much as fully contemporary artifacts: products of bodies displayed and circulated as images, commodities, and data.
This tension between animation and inertia, subject and object, is amplified in Miller’s new collaborative project with Danish artist Nina Beier, The Populace, at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum. Conceived as an immersive installation, the exhibition deploys mannequins set before rows of anonymous portraits to construct a dense field of reciprocal gazes, in which viewer and viewed seem to trade places. Here, the uncanny is no longer confined to the individual figure but distributed across a network of bodies, images, and spectators—where identity, authenticity, and value demand renegotiation.
For his upcoming lecture at the Kunstakademie Munich, Miller will discuss these concerns, focusing on how mannequins, redeployed as a critical intervention, may expose the latent contents of everyday life. Positioned at the intersection of sculpture and cultural analysis, his work underscores how the uncanny persists not as an exception, but as a structural feature of contemporary culture.
THE BODY AS SITE, THE BODY IN PUBLIC
Workshop
This workshop will examine the politics of representation, embodiment, and public space in contemporary art and critical theory. Drawing from the October roundtable discussion “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the Informe and the Abject,” as well as my essay "The Body as Site," we will explore signification, ideology, and bodily experience vis-à-vis art production and spectatorship.
We will specifically consider the 1993 Whitney Museum exhibition, which inspired the October roundtable: Abject Art: Desire and Repulsion in American Art": Selections from the Permanent Collection, which included works by Andres Serrano, Kiki Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, and Paul McCarthy. More broadly, we will consider what works such as these imply for the relationship between the signifier and the signified in structuralist and poststructuralist thought; the concepts of the informe and abjection in the writings of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva; and debates surrounding materiality and representation. Particular attention will be paid to how artists have negotiated questions of public identity, transgression, sexuality, the body, and institutional critique from the 1990s on.
I will specifically discuss works of mine that used a brown impasto trope and how these eventually led to later works that address public space, such as Reconstructing a Public Sphere and Civic Center, which consider how public life is increasingly mediated by digital technology, architecture, surveillance, social performance, and systems of communication.
Throughout the workshop, I will introduce and recount historical and theoretical contexts that can be collectively discussed in relation to contemporary artistic practice. Rather than presenting theory as a closed system, I will emphasize interpretation, contradiction, and debate, and the ways in which artworks produce meaning through structures that are at once aesthetic, political, psychological, and social.
John Miller is an artist and writer based in New York and Berlin. His artwork and criticism investigate the role of aesthetics within mass culture. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Musée d'Art Moderene et Contemporain, Geneva, La Magasin in Grenoble, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Kunsthalle Zurich, the ICA Miami, the Museum in Bellpark, Kriens, Switzerland, the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, and the Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland have held solo exhibitions of his work. In 2011, Miller received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Society for Contemporary Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In 1991, he received a fellowship from the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). His publications include Mike Kelley: Educational Complex (Afterall Books, 2015), The Ruin of Exchange: Selected Writings, and The Price Club: Selected Writings (1977-1998) (both JRP-Ringier and the Consortium's Positions series), Reconstructing a Public Sphere, and Contradicting Statements (both Walther König Verlag). Miller is a Professor of Professional Practice in Barnard College’s Art History Department.
Part of the ongoing series Das Politische der Kunst. A collaboration with Franziska Sophie Wildförster
Talk
11.06.2026 7 pm
Studio Widmann A 2.30