Domenic Hutchins Writer, Creative Music, Rare Book Seller

Domenic Hutchins (b. 1991, U.S.) received undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy before entering the fields of art criticism and the antiquarian book trade. Between 2017 and 2019, Hutchins presented a diverse selection of rigorous research at a range of conferences on subjects including Andrew Durbin’s contemporary eco-poetics, Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic political philosophy, and differing approaches to archival research in and outside the university. Through labels such as HighsmithPsy (US) and Superpang (Italy), Hutchins has presented acoustic and electronic music works with disparate collaborators including poet Adrienne Herr, improviser Ananya Ganesh, composer Greg Davis, among others. In 2023, the music of Ganesh and Hutchins (as Mme Sand) was selected by Berlin-based curator Juliette Henrioud to be played on the Mallorcan channel Nits de la Tramuntana (see below).

An avid organizer of creative music concerts in the Northeast (and North America more broadly), Hutchins has in 2022 and 2023 installed an extensive public-facing archive of ‘90s Chicago music 10-years-in-the-making at Chicago’s beloved ESS; presented unpublished multi-prepared-piano works on Swedish radio; performed at prisoner advocacy coalition events; and published an essay exploring racial politics surrounding the work of early minimalist Terry Jennings (1940–1981). After invitations by Journal of Sonic Studies (NL), Sound American (US), and others, he has begun research on Iancu Dumitrescu and Axel Dörner. Further working to dissolve the rifts between the sensual, the aesthetic and the politico-rational, Hutchins is currently preparing a lengthy manuscript (in private circulation, 2019 to present), “Please Note Our Failure : Two Generations of American Experimental Music” that embraces the fields of art history, aesthetic politics, music criticism, film and social philosophy. 

Hutchins has also completed graduate work at Tufts’s Museum Studies program and University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. In addition to these activities, Hutchins is fervently active in local politics and through his associations, and regularly volunteers with the Appalachian Trail Club and other such beneficent organizations.

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS, PUBLICATIONS, MONOGRAPHS, PAPERS, INTERVIEWS

2024 “Ephemerality & the archive: Encountering the 2nd generation of the AACM, via recordings & concerts in the ‘80s”: An Interview with Gene Coleman

2024 “Cover letter: The Internationalism of ‘90s Chicago’s Underground Music Scene”

2023 “Perpetual Crossings: Terry Jennings, A Lost Link” 

2021 “‘…one would sink in a sea of Rauschen’”: IN MEMORIAM. Peter Rehberg & the New Internationale”

2021 “New York – But in Chicago: On John Cage, Morton Feldman & Merce Cunningham’s Postmodern Afterlives”

2020 “Intergenerational Rapport Across Art: Cage, Cunningham & Co.”

2019 Please Note Our Failure: Two Generations of American Experimental Music

2019 “David Grubbs: ‘My instinct is that in some ways…’”: Interview, September 2019”

2019 “Constantly Connecting the Dots” (From Henry Kaiser to Eternity—): An Interview with Alan Licht on Unlikely Musical Correspondences”

2019  “Object & Objectivity in the Archive” 

2018 The Passing Away of Nature: Two Essays on Natural History 

2017 “A post-Sandy Literature? Writing Contemporary Ecological Subjectivity” 

2017 “Looking Back On Adorno’s Late-Marxism (On the Centennial of the Russian Revolution)” 

2017 “On the Non-identity of Experience and the Concept: A Critical Reading of Theodor W. Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies”

2016 “On Wertkritik: Against the Fetish of ‘the Omnipotence of Critique’”

2016 “‘Corridor in the Hotel’: Explicating and Applying William James’s Pragmatist Critique of Temperament”

2016 “The Problem of Historical Consciousness in Théorie Communiste and Communisation”

2015 “The Pharmakon of Nature: Reading G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature in the Anthropocene”

2014 “Recuperated Spontaneity or Bad Infinity? A Character Study of Godard’s Jean-Pierre Léaud”

2014 “Lending Voices To Suffering: Theodor W. Adorno’s Interdisciplinary Cultural Criticism”

2013 Kierkegaard’s Ethical Critique of Hegel and His Literary Experimentation with Communicating Ethical and Religious Knowledge

Artistic and musical background

Hutchins grew up in a musical household in Portland, Maine, and first fell in love with the visual arts as a child, which ran through his time studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art at 16 and the University of Southern Maine at 17. As a child he also studied classical piano, and in his teens he studied jazz guitar for several years with a personal friend of B.B. King, Valtimar “Val” Mollineaux, an experience that also keyed him to the African American experience. Playing bass guitar in middle school jazz ensembles and guitar for high school plays, he devoted the bulk of his teenage years to free improvisation in a range of groups and ad hoc settings that centered on unbridled creativity and ecstatic group exploration—and all within a non-idiomatic musical language. During his college years, he played an important role in assisting in the formation of the noted art rock band, Palm—helping the group find their longstanding drummer after he himself, however bemusedly, turned down the position, along with other assistance. (Anyone who knows Hutchins knows of his longstanding fascination with a certain figure from a certain mid-western place, a fascination that since his teens has presented, despite all its splendor, the ultimate undecidability between modernism and a putative postmodernism we might call our own.)   

Antiquarian Book Selling background

Having worked full-time in the antiquarian book trade for nearly a decade, Hutchins is proficient in handling and cataloging a wide range of materials that embrace maps and bird’s eye views, photography, rare books and sammelbands, manuscript and typescript, lithography and chromolithography, ephemera, archives, broadsides and handbills, fine art, material culture, African Americana, and Western Americana. Having studied at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, Hutchins is well-versed in the bibliographic and auction literature that is part and parcel of the antiquarian, map, and rare book trades, while his study in Tufts’s Museum Studies program has deepened his knowledge of the intricate symbiotic relationship between institutions, dealers, curators, special collections, and the trade. Hutchins often attends antiquarian book fairs in the Northeast and also avidly assists in acquiring and placing materials. Contributing to Hutchins’ proficiency in this field is his own decade-long study of such authors on archival research and method as Saidiya Hartman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Melville, Michel Foucault and Susan Howe, a topic he has presented on at academic conferences. Given these interests, it is no surprise that Hutchins takes a particular interest in the broader ecosystem surrounding the trade—that supports and sustains it—which embraces framing, auction houses, book and paper restoration, curators, historical salvage, art workers, fairs, journalists, promoters, and the art world. A small sampling of his work is accessible here.  

Academic background

Fascinated by the literature of Kafka, Camus, Beckett, and Sartre from a young age, Hutchins is honored to have studied with a range of distinguished scholars over the years such as Susan Buck-Morss, Tilottama Rajan, Alan Bass, Chris Cutrone (in SAIC’s Visual and Critical Studies), Eva Guelen, James Miller, Daniel Berthold-Bond, Peg Birmingham, Michael Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and Joel Whitebook. He is particularly grateful to have been exposed to the work of art historian Stephen Melville while at Bard College, whose unique blend of Stanley Cavell, Michael Fried, deconstruction, and G.W.F. Hegel has left an indelible impression on him and has guided his own subsequent work. From essentially age 22 to 27, Hutchins devoted himself almost exclusively to the fractious (post-anarchist, post-Marxist, etc.) Youth Group geist in Chicago and New York City (often attending conferences and events), and extensively studied the corollary natural history of the left. While studying in graduate school with Tilottama Rajan on a full scholarship at Western University, Hutchins deepened his exposure to post-Derridean deconstruction and its relation to German Idealism, the original version of his Master’s thesis written in the improbable two-faced style of Glas (1974). 

Hutchins’ current research and teaching interests center on the largely unexplored territory between art history, visual studies and media studies.

“Feldman is most compelling on the nature of artistic freedom. The academician is not interested in the matter because ‘in freedom he cannot reenact the role of the artist.’”—Kyle Gann

“[I]t can be tempting to imagine that poststructuralism can be defined in whole or in part by a certain return of or to phenomenology. There is, I think, something to this: but it also mistakes both the extent to which questions of perception and interpretation have been radically recast by the appeal to Saussure’s model of language and the extent to which the interests underlying that appeal, outside of its most purely scientistic forms, are shaped precisely by a history of engagement with phenomenology and its hermeneutical offspring. This, I would argue, is visible even in the work of Lévi-Strauss—an aspect of his work that is lucidly registered by Ricouer in his remark that what Lévi-Strauss urges is a Kantism without a transcendental ego, a description that opens an easy passage between that work and Heidegger’s. This of course would be to suggest that the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism is less usefully thought of as a difference about phenomenology than as the unfolding or repetition of a difference properly within it, marking limits at once internal and external to it. That is, structuralism and poststructuralism alike can be said to belong, in part at least, to phenomenology just insofar as it is not a settled body of practices or propositions but something more like a style or a movement—and is a movement just because it is bound to the unfolding ambiguities of its claim to grasp things as they are—ambiguities that importantly pass between “description” and “interpretation.” If the emergence of theory marks a crisis for phenomenology, bringing out its internal impasses and demanding its continuation in a radically transformed register (one in which it can no longer or only with great difficulty recognize itself), this is perhaps because the newer work forces the recognition that what presents itself as perceptual cannot be registered except under some condition of legibility—which is to say that the ambiguities within the claim to “grasp things as they are” are not simply infelicitous features of a language we are obliged to use but are a part of the structure of that grasp.”— S. M., Seams