I never met the critic, artist, and educator Christine Tamblyn. However, through her essays in Afterimage, she taught me most of what I know about the capacities of critical writing, the ethos of the public intellectual, and the need to write the history of feminist and experimental media practices.
Tamblyn was born in Illinois in 1951 and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as an undergrad to study video and performance. She went on to earn her MFA in 1986 at UC San Diego, where she worked with Eleanor Antin, David Antin, and Allan Kaprow, and then she began teaching, eventually becoming an assistant professor in UC Irvine’s Department of Studio Art. However, it wasn’t Tamblyn’s academic trajectory that was most instructive; instead, what stands out is her ardent commitment to grappling with the evolution of video and computer art as a critic writing for a series...
University of California Press