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Colin Tucker

@colintuckerstudio.bsky.social
194 followers 247 following 52 posts

Artist & writer. Experimental music & contemporary art. Critical excavation of whiteness and coloniality/-ism in concert music and territorial politics. Website: colintucker.studio Settler in Tkaronto/Toronto - Dish with One Spoon Treaty Territory

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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Re: the Boulez anniversary: "This article examines the lessons that Pierre Boulez learned about sound from Antonin Artaud, suggesting that Boulez's ideas about musical writing (écriture) took shape as the composer imagined and appropriated forms of non-European expression."
cambridge.org
Ontological Appropriation: Boulez and Artaud | Twentieth-Century Music | Cambridge Core
Ontological Appropriation: Boulez and Artaud - Volume 18 Issue 2
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
re: the Boulez anniversary, look up PB's longtime friend and correspondent André Schaeffner, who founded and directed a department at the Musée de l'Homme and participated in multiple "object"-"music"-plundering expeditions in Africa fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...
fr.wikipedia.org
André Schaeffner — Wikipédia
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
re: the Boulez anniversary, look up PB's longtime friend and correspondent André Schaeffner, who founded and directed a department at the Musée de l'Homme and participated in multiple "object"-"music"-plundering expeditions in Africa fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...
fr.wikipedia.org
André Schaeffner — Wikipédia
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Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
Fossil fuel companies should be forced to pay the public trillions in damages for the costs of their planetary arson. Instead they are trying to shut down one of the most important and storied environmental groups in the world. It's shameless - and it's not over. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
theguardian.com
Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury
Non-profit said in statement lawsuits like this aimed at ‘destroying the right to peaceful protest’
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Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
This is a corporate attempt to put an end to climate protest and *particularly* to Indigenous led climate protest. Massive 1A assault. Pretty shocking that our little outlet was one of maybe 3 or 4 that had a reporter there every day of the trial (one of the others was a fake newspaper 🙃)
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Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
They are coming for every university, if you think you’re safe because it hasn’t been yours yet I don’t know what to tell you. Join AAUP, refuse to comply, organize your colleagues
thedp.com
Trump administration freezes $175 million in federal funding to Penn
According to a White House tweet, Wednesday's decision is a result of Penn's
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Looking forward to realizing and sharing my pieces with new (to me) folks next Thursday in Seattle. Thanks to Aaron Michael Butler for playing and hosting! #ClassicalMusic #Aesthetics #ConcertHall #Artwashing #ContemporaryArt #InstitutionalCritique
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K R @kringelberg.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
Also relevant (from Autry's essay in Mallory, Seidenstein, Burke, Jackson, Kéla, eds. _Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade : Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures._ (Boston: BRILL, 2025)). (And @arunadsouza.bsky.social you came up in the Q&A, natch.)
In short, I have found that the denial of reality upheld through a brash
lack of criticality makes hegemonic museums, to use Umberto Eco’s expression, “closed texts.” As such, they become limited, self-contained worlds that legitimize their own narratives. The ability to ignore histories of conquest and parasitism sustains the ruling class that profits from that violence. Erasing and concealing reality forecloses widespread critique and potential political action against past and current extraction. The myth of neutrality, which permeates other industries, such as journalism and science, mediates how people understand not just hegemonic museums but, more importantly, the world at large. Through distracting and deluding, it contributes to a network of obscuring forces that prevent people from understanding how power operates.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
Sharing new work in Seattle-Tacoma and (virtually) in England this month
Performance: Feeling as Capacity/ Feeling as Relation, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, March 20, 2025

Talk: "Primitivism and the Racialization of Sensation in David Tudor’s Rainforest series," Society for American Music, Tacoma, March 22, 2025

Virtual Talk: "'Like an empty glass, nothing but wheat:' John Cage’s Chance Systems and/as White Possessive Logics," Composing (with) Systems, University of Sheffield, England, March 27, 2025
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
Presenting at @caavisual next week in Lenapehoking/"NYC" on apocalyptic c0l0nizing logics deeply embedded in Aesthetic philosophy and practice, as a step towards a decolonial dismantling of the Aesthetic and a closer aligning of art pedagogy and practice with decolonial social movements.
"Art History and Apocalypse: 
A Decolonial 
Re-Orientation:"

on the unthought yet deep influence of Spanish conquist-adors' writings on Immanuel Kant's aesthetics, and what this means for a decolonial reckoning with the Aesthetic

College Art Association
Feb. 13, 2025, 11am
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
Presenting artwork & talks in Tkaronto and Lenapehoking over the next few weeks. For details and links, visit my website.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
Writing today about Kant's extensive debt to the writings of Spanish Conquistadors, and what that means for decolonial approaches to all modern Western artistic disciplines. I'll be presenting this writing at the College Art Association conference in "NYC"/Lenapehoking on February 13.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
Next week in Tkaronto. Features my piece "in the wake of the santa maria," presented for the first time in a video version.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Tkaronto: I will be presenting prose and an installation from my book in progress on the politics of sensation in the concert hall Feb 6, 12noon, Luella Massey Playhouse.
cdtps.utoronto.ca
FOOT 2025
Learn more about the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies 33rd FOOT Conference taking place from February 6 to 7, 2025.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Delighted to be contributing to this exhibition at York University, curated by Aftab Mirzaei. Runs Feb. 3-7; opening reception is Wednesday, Feb. 5, 5-7pm.
ndstudiolab.com
Speculative Meteorology: Weather Channeled
nD::StudioLab, Digital Media, School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design, York University, Toronto, On.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
Events coming up in Lenapehoking ("NYC"), "Seattle," and Tkaronto/Toronto-area.
colintucker.studio
Events
“The Relational Spectator: Marking Racializing Relations in Concert Music Protocols,” Festival of Original Theatre, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, Luella Massey Play…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
Null Point's 2023 publication is now updated, with sections on new topics. Feel free to copy and paste into your syllabus; but study should be followed up by action to change infrastructures (certain texts on the list take up what this might entail). L|nk |n comments.
Dismantling the whiteness of concert music: a reading list. Now updated, with new sections on policing, media, musical instruments, and tuning.
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Lainna Fader @lainna.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
Holy cow. Just woke up to this view from mid-Wilshire looking downtown
Wildfire in Los Angeles
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
New text. 2024 was a Significant Anniversary of composer Charles Ives. I trace how this could have been an occasion for decolonial, abolitionist reckoning with a problematic figure, and yet US settler music institutions instead doubled down on an anti-Black, colonial status quo.
colintucker.studio
Reckoning with the Legacies of Charles Ives
content note: written discussion of relations of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness During 2024, a profusion of discourse was produced to mark the passing of a Significant Anniversary of compos…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 26/12/2024
Currently finishing a short piece about this. Drops tomorrow on my website.
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Infrasonic Press @infrasonicpress.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Null Point has published “De-normalizing ‘Wide Open Spaces:’ Notes Towards a Decolonial Performance Practice” Written by @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social, it concerns their realization of Yoko Ono’s “Hide Piece,” from Rust Belt Artists Against Gen*cide. nullpointseries.wordpress.com/words/de-nor...
nullpointseries.wordpress.com
De-Normalizing “Wide Open Spaces:” Notes Towards a Decolonial Performance Practice
an essay introducing the audio track Hide Piece by Null Point, based on the score by Yoko Ono, released on the compilation Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide (Infrasonic Press) by Colin Tucker (set…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
It is "Messiah season" and, yet again, there is a deafening silence from presenters on the composer's investments in human trafficking. In this 2023 piece, I argued that these investments were inseparable from "purely musical" aspects of the composer's work. colintucker.studio/projects/bef...
colintucker.studio
before the empire lives long
for musical sample and annotation May 6, 2023 content description: verbal descriptions of racializing stereotypes, references to slavery, colonization, and environmental destruction Statement: “lon…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
I might write something about this. But the overwhelming institutional silence on this needs to be marked in and of itself.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Despite Charles Ives's explicit misogyny, anti-Indigenous rhetoric, and anti-Blackness (he participated in minstrel shows), I have yet to see anything resembling a critical take on his work or discourse during this anniversary year. (Please let me know if I'm overlooking something).
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
New essay available: nullpointseries.wordpress.com/words/de-nor...
"The present project ... [takes] as axiomatic that all fashionings of Indigenous Land have a constitutive relationship to sovereign Indigenous nations. While this principle is foundational to contemporary Indigenous politics and critical theory on Turtle Island and elsewhere, its implications for US colonizer-settler art musics are extremely unsettling..."
-Colin Tucker, "De-normalizing 'wide open spaces:' Notes Towards a Decolonial Performance Practice"
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Soraya Nadia McDonald @soraya.press · 13/12/2024
Lorraine O'Grady lifted me up with her intellect, her wit, her nerve. This assignment came at a point in my life when I needed it and didn't even know. She was a blessing. I am saddened to know Lorraine has passed, and I am endlessly grateful to her. She lit flames that will never go out. 🖤
harpersbazaar.com
The Audacity of Lorraine O’Grady
In wake of her tragic passing today, we revisit our 2024 interview with the renegade and eternally punk-rock conceptual artist.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
Published a year ago and sadly still relevant...
nullpointseries.wordpress.com
Tchaikovsky’s Land of Plunder
Last month, countless people—particularly in the Global North—made an annual outing to hear the ballet The Nutcracker (1892) with music by Peter Illich Tchaikovsky. This ballet continues to be so p…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
New newsletter going out soon. Sign up here. It's monthly at most.
colintucker.studio
Contact
To contact me, please write to ColinLTucker [at] gmail [dot] com. To subscribe to my sporadic (at most monthly) newsletter, please enter your email address below:
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
As I argue in detail in my new essay, Americana art music's institutional history indexes how large/legacy (settler) concert music institutions have been chronically unable to even notice the colonialism-imperialism being enacted right in front of their own eyes/ears.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
New essay out, which is both a critique and proposal for a critical & otherwise performance practice. Please share widely with concert music networks, especially those on occupied Turtle Island. For the record, I am happy to chat with anyone (formally or informally) who will engage in good faith.
nullpointseries.wordpress.com
De-Normalizing “Wide Open Spaces:” Notes Towards a Decolonial Performance Practice
an essay introducing the audio track Hide Piece by Null Point, based on the score by Yoko Ono, released on the compilation Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide (Infrasonic Press) by Colin Tucker (set…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
New essay out today on reckoning with settler imperial logics in Americana art music through critical performance practice grounded in Indigenous & decolonial studies analytics; I also reflect on how this project relates to present-day struggles against the Zionist outpost of US empire
nullpointseries.wordpress.com
De-Normalizing “Wide Open Spaces:” Notes Towards a Decolonial Performance Practice
an essay introducing the audio track Hide Piece by Null Point, based on the score by Yoko Ono, released on the compilation Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide (Infrasonic Press) by Colin Tucker (set…
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Aram Sinnreich @aramsinn.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
This is a really valuable tool to evaluate environmental cancer risk, block-by-block in the USA. If you're looking to buy a home, check the address first.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Drops Monday: new essay introducing the broader project of which this track is a part. Through a grounding in Indigenous studies, the essay locates how colonial dispossession is foundational to Americana art music, and proposes a decolonial performance practice for/against this music.
infrasonicpress.bandcamp.com
Hide Piece, by Null Point
from the album Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide
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Daniel Rück @danrueck.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
After a decade of empty reconciliation talk, we're still pretty much in the same place, except now facing a fascist backlash to all things progressive
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Christina Battle @cbattle.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
On NDAs in the Canadian Arts Sector: "With countless examples of unjust experiences, wrongful dismissals, and the weaponization of confidentiality language, we are grieving the incredible loss of potential for what our art world could accomplish and grow into" blackflash.ca/silencing-in...
blackflash.ca
Silencing in the Sector
An essay by the Aisle 4 Collective shares findings from their ongoing research project into the role of non-disclosure agreements.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Axiomatic to Indigenous critical theory (as I read it): all fashionings of (occupied) Indigenous Land have a constitutive relation to sovereign Indigenous Nations. If taken seriously, this principle radically destabilizes the underlying terms of existing settler artistic production.
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
"By 1913, virtually all of the ivory imported to the US from Africa was manufactured into pianos, and two thirds of that ivory came from the Congo." -Sean Murray, "Pianos, Ivory, and Empire" ...Yet complete silence from art music institutions about this history & its present-day legacies...
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
A line in the sand which I have found useful: in a work, field, institution, etc., are the analytics of specific anti-oppressive fields of knowledge (Black, decolonial, trans, disability, etc.) meaningfully thinkable or are they unthinkable? (On the (un)thinkable, I find MR Trouillot useful).
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Peak liberal settler colonialism
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Recent audio and text project of mine, marking settler colonial power in canonical Americana music, via a Yoko Ono score and Indigenous critical theory. A related project drops next week.
nullpointseries.wordpress.com
De-Normalizing “Wide Open Spaces”
With grief, anger, and solidarity, Null Point announces the release of three related decolonial projects. In opposition to the recent intensification of Zionist violence in Palestine and Lebanon, w…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Recent audio and text project of mine, marking settler colonial power in canonical Americana music, via a Yoko Ono score and Indigenous critical theory. A related project drops next week.
nullpointseries.wordpress.com
De-Normalizing “Wide Open Spaces”
With grief, anger, and solidarity, Null Point announces the release of three related decolonial projects. In opposition to the recent intensification of Zionist violence in Palestine and Lebanon, w…
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Link here: colintucker.studio/writing/posi...
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Colin Tucker @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
As part of introducing myself on here, I want to share a recent piece of writing about positionality in artistic production. I challenge a certain common-sense around this matter, which I argue actually entrenches existing white supremacy.
the institutions of the Western public sphere are hardly politically neutral; for instance, a reading list I recently published demonstrates how most of the concert hall’s protocols and infrastructures are actively implicated in racializing work (Tucker 2024). Therefore, even when, say, white concert music composers make and circulate work that does not explicitly take racialization as subject matter, they are still implicated in (re)producing racializing frameworks. From this standpoint, the directive that “white artists shouldn’t make art about race” actually obfuscates and disavows their/our always-already racializing institutional position, while also closing off possibilities for challenging this positioning.more nuanced approaches to positionality are needed if it is going to be meaningfully possible for artists read as white to disrupt the myriad and complex ways in which their/our artistic production reiterates racializing relations. The operative question, then, might be not whether artists racialized as white “should” make work about racialization but how they/we might engage in position- and power-sensitive ways in dismantling racializing mechanisms which, for instance, Black study scholars have argued are intrinsic to the Public Sphere (Wilderson 2010), the Aesthetic (Lloyd 2018, Bradley 2023), and Western post-Enlightenment notions of sensory-emotional Cultivation (Schuller 2018). On Positionality: Notes Towards Power-Sensitive Protocols for White and Settler Artists
 
by Colin Tucker 
 
colintucker.studio/writing/positionality/
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Jasmine K Gani @jasminekgani.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
👇
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C Daks MD @cdakin.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Check your block lists carefully. Some of them are being used to silence activists and scholars (esp POC).
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