Vanessa Place’s work occurs in the space between the verdict and the sentence. We could extract and deconstruct the possible meanings of that claim, and if we did, it would follow on Place’s own efforts. Vanessa Place occurs in a space marked by the agreed upon fictions that constitute law, the cringey fallaciousness of morality’s supposed fixity, and a forensic if not necrophilic examination of the outlying cultures after ‘cancel culture.’

As a lawyer, Place is vigilant around the most scapegoated positions within legal systems and social codes. She draws forward inconvenient reminders about the highly temporal, unstable, yet stridently decreed regulative forces by which the wheat has been routinely identified as such in order to prosecute/persecute the resultant chaff within the symbolic orders of heterosexist-white supremacist-capitalist-colonialist-patriarchy-etc etc. Her 2010 book The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law is one of the most trenchantly ethical (and for that matter, elegant) arguments we’ve encountered calling for a nuanced analysis of sex, violence, crime, punishment, power, and abuse. As with anything Place authors, it’s not for the squeamish. Rather, Vanessa Place’s work anticipates an audience both lusty and diligent, circumspect and courageously experimental.

As a poet-cum-performer-cum-artist, Place grapples with staid assumptions around individuality, originality, expression, reception, and context. Within her quote unquote Conceptual Poetry milieu, she traces out a particularly mordant scat play—the tethered vestiges between “refuse” and refusal, “knowing non-utility,” “excremental remainder,” “excrescence,” and, well, “shit.” This is the abject end of the law: murky mud wrestling while looking down the barrel of punishment dispensed, casting sly aspersions on the interplays of pleasure, desire, domination, and bloodsport that trail latently behind accusations and affirmations of wrongdoing. Love is a battlefield, or, rather, your body is a battleground, er, I mean, your body is a wonderland, and freedom is a constant struggle—with known associations to gorgons, harmful tropes, wicked witches, nasty women, divas, and queer deviants. The common [criminal] element is an encroaching doubt, an attempted coordination that ends always in a question mark rather than any form of declaration.

From Place’s text “The artist is a trout”: “Art, therefore, is a question…To me, this goes a long way towards the why of art. Not to resolve violence, for art is violence, violence done to time and space and the mute fact of representation. Because of its predicate violence, art insists on constant interpretation, constant evaluation, constant conversation, and endless conversions.” Unflinching and saturated with a droll humility about the entire enterprise of our creative inventions, Place places art-as-violence in close proximity to a convulsive, shifting ethics and in stark contrast to moral rightness, “Ethics are contentious, contingent, formal. Morality, contrarily, is choral. Morality is always right because it is right at the moment.”

RUSCHWOMAN is flushed with pleasure to share Vanessa Place’s edition of the gallery’s questionnaire. She is one of our time’s most critical and formidable ethicists—a position we doubt she would ever claim or desire for its untenability as much as any other reason. At the opening of The Guilt Project she recalls an interaction in court:

“…[T]he court clerk asked me, ‘How can you live with yourself?’ I said that I don’t.”




Anna Netrebko, Elina Garanca


What are your beauty secrets?

Curiosity and the love of a younger woman.



Leontyne Price, Cleopatra


What’s the matter?

The coarse indifference of time.



What is your greatest extravagance?

Love.



What is your most treasured possession?

A silver bangle worn by mother before me.



Do you keep a diary?

I keep a cahier, which is not precisely the same.



What or who is the greatest love of your life?

Jillian McManemin.
(I also love my children.)



VP, Jillian McManemin


When and where were you happiest?

Now and here.



What was your first job?

Bagging groceries at the base commissary, all raw hands and constant paper cuts.



Which living person do you most admire?

Paul McCarthy.



If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

A gold Eid Mar coin.



Pretty Yende, Lucia di Lammermoor


What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Morality.



Do you cook? If no, how do you feed yourself? If yes, do you have a signature recipe?

Yes. But she does as well, the conceit being not in a signature, but in the competition.
I’m not winning.



Duchamp, Oeuf a la coque


What did you have for breakfast?

2 barely boiled eggs.



How do you usually sleep?

With my lover.



V. Place, transcript piece


What questions are you asking yourself?

Why and how each war formally affines to a particular aesthetic, what is the purchase of the choral in the moral and how does this coincide or contradict the ethical, what is the servitude of the social, why is it pleasurable, where is the point of the sculptural, the subversion of the bel canto, the duty towards the despicable, should I buy $25 lip balm, and what is my best shade of red.



Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

“To be fair” “nonetheless” “alles ist tot”



Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, Semiramide


Which talent would you most like to have?

Comedic timing.



What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Soldiering on.



Describe your work space. What qualities do you need in your environment to do what you do?

A long red picnic table with many screens before me and batches of books behind me and the oak scent of rigour throughout.



Sondra Radvanovsky, Tosca


Describe your dream date.

Dinner, Tosca, sex, in any order.



Where would you most like to live?

Indoors.



Which living person do you most despise?

The person in line in front of me.



Paul McCarthy, Christmas tree


What do you most value in your friends?

A subtle arrogance.



What do you most enjoy wearing?

Perfume and a tailored skirt suit.



Who are your favorite writers?

Tacitus, Shakespeare, Dante.



Do you have a favorite film?

Yes.



Is there an album or piece of music you listen to the most?

Lucia di Lammermoor, Act 3



What are you reading right now?

Cicero and Lucan.



Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Livia Drusilla.



VP, Paul McCarthy, Lilith Strangenberg


Is there anything you regret not doing?

Sadly, no.



Maggi Hambling Wave breaks


Favorite drink?

Taken at dusk.



Favorite smell?

The small of the back.



Favorite color?

Pantone 289C



Favorite time of day?

8 p.m. It has an air of certainty and possibility.



Where do you dance?

In the club.



Do you have anything going on or coming up you want to plug?
Where can people find you? Website address? Instagram handle?

A catalogue of women, forthcoming from Insert Press.

IG @vanessaplacex.