Critical Closeness, Intimate Distance: Encounters in the Love Art Laboratory

The article considers the intertwining of closeness and distance as critical modes, focusing on the public sharing of their intimate relationship in Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’ Love Art Laboratory project (2005-11). The article highlights the encounter with the work and its contingent effect on the act of critical interpretation. The risks of uncertainty and ambivalence in the writerly introduction of the personal perspective are discussed and, in part, enacted in a process of critical engagement that follows the emotional, as well as the intellectual movements of the work. This is troublesome for conventional analysis in so far as it multiplies possibilities rather than fixing art practice as paradigmatic of a theoretical ‘position’. Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’ practice is expansive and mobile enough to carry many views, and becomes the basis for an exploration of both personal and public intimacies, both in their performances and as part of the enterprise of critical writing.