G. Roger Denson

G. Roger Denson (born 1956) is an American journalist, cultural and art critic, theoretician, novelist, and curator. He was a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. His writings have also appeared in, and his subject artwork appeared on the cover of, Art in America, Parkett, Artscribe, Flash Art, Cultural Politics, Bijutsu Techo, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Artbyte, Arts Magazine, Tema Celeste, 'Trans>Arts, Culture, Media, Journal of Contemporary Art, Contemporanea and M/E/A/N/I/N/G.
Denson has written on the criticism of Thomas McEvilley in Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism. Denson's monographs and catalogues include Dennis Oppenheim, Hunter Reynolds: Memento Mori, Memoriter, Michael Young: Predella of Difference. And in the book by , Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, Denson has contributed to the chapter, "Robert Morris Replies to Roger Denson (Or Is That a Mouse in My Paragon?)".
Early work
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Denson established a reputation as a nomadic ideologist.
This is also when he curated exhibitions, screenings, performance art, and talks with such artists as Suzanne Lacy, Joan Jonas, Steve Paxton and Dancers, Trisha Brown and Dancers, Eric Fischl, Shigeko Kubota, Yvonne Rainer, Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, , Lew Thomas, Gretchen Faust, Leon Golub, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, Wolfgang Staehle, Jimmy De Sana, Claudia Hart, Mira Schor, Susan Bee, Lydia Dona, and Mimi Smith, Scott B and Beth B, Polly Apfelbaum, Kathe Burkhart, Chrysanne Stathacos, among numerous others.
Denson curated primarily at Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York, with fellow artist-curators Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and Charles Clough, but later was a guest curator with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; A-Space, Toronto; The New Museum of Contemporary Art; The Alternative Museum; Abington Art Center, Philadelphia; and various New York commercial galleries. All of which contributed to his serving on the Gallery Association of New York's Board of Directors. Perhaps the exhibition for which he is best known as a curator is Poetic Injury: The Surrealist Legacy in Postmodern Photography, held at The Alternative Museum, with a catalogue and essays by Denson and Suzaan Boettger, and a preface by Rosalind Krauss.
Recent work
In 2004, Denson co-wrote and edited the performance script for Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty: Entertainment by Dan Graham and Tony Oursler, performed at Art Basel Miami Beach; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Vienna; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2004-05. A film montage of the performance made by Tony Oursler was installed at the Whitney Biennial 2006, Whitney Museum of Art in New York.
From 2005 to 2008, Denson developed and taught MFA courses in art criticism and writing at New York's School of Visual Arts.
In 2010, Denson personified nomadic diversity in his novel, Voice of Force (published with Oracle Press) not only in his characters, but by relinquishing the author's godlike perspective and voice and replacing it with narration by multiple voices loudly expressing contrasting points of view.
After the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, Denson reviewed for HuffPost the opening of architect Michael Arad's elaborate 9/11 Memorial, "'Reflecting Absence': More Than a Metaphor Or A Monument".
In 2017, just before Denson retired from teaching and dedicated himself strictly to writing, he contributed to the monograph Splendid Voids, The Immersive Works of Kurt Hentschläger, an essay titled "The Splendid Phenomenology of Hentschlägerian Voids".

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