alterity

His contributions to the 2022 Whitney Biennial, on view through Sept. 5 — three fanciful portraits of Erik Prince, the financier and founder of the private security firm Blackwater — depict a powerful white man at leisure among roomfuls of work focused on abstraction and alterity.

To call what’s just happened in Texas “medieval” is wrong, but this is a common move intending to impose what we call “chronological alterity” between us and something that we abhor.

That alterity set in motion a series of experiences that gave my life meaning and gave me an advantage that I think is incredibly precious and hard-won.

In a concrete and sexual form the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in the keenest consciousness of the other and the self … the dimension of the other remains; but the fact is that alterity no longer has a hostile character; this consciousness of the union of the bodies in their separation is what makes the sexual act moving.”

A scholastic dissertation on the relationship between “alterity and ipseity” — otherness and selfhood, to use common language — becomes almost satirical juxtaposed with a painting of an attractive young woman casually posed in regal profile on a throne-like upholstered chair.