Vanessa Place

Place earned a BA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an MFA at Antioch University, and a JD at Boston University.

Place is a criminal defense attorney who represents indigent sex offenders on appeal. She has previously published and performed works using courtroom materials. For example, her performance piece Last Words, reproduces the last statements of all inmates executed in Texas since 1982. Naomi Toth, writing about Last Words for Jacket2, states the work occurs "in a context in which, the listener realizes, speaking becomes the pronunciation of one’s own death sentence." Place's trilogy Tragodía (Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, Argument) was a self-appropriation of sections of her appellate briefs on behalf of sex offenders as a contemporary response to Dante's Commedía.

In her 2010 book The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law (Other Press), Place reflects on an experience when a court clerk asked her, "How can you live with yourself?" during a "particularly gruesome" child rape case. "I said that I don’t," Place wrote. She goes on: "My job is not predicated on innocence. In our famously adversarial system of justice, we the actors play parts that are as important as the play. It’s a cliché that a society is judged by how it treats its most despicable members, a cliché that mindful people accept in the abstract and reject in practice. But freedom of speech is relevant only when the opinions are vile, and due process meaningful only when applied to the daddy who rapes his son."

Statement of Facts

Controversy around Place's Tragodía series began when literary critic Marjorie Perloff described the work as "a superb piece of conceptual writing," and presented a summation of the project at the 2010 Rethinking Poetics conference held at Columbia University. A number of American poets subsequently debated the merit of the work through a number of blogs and online forums in response to Perloff's statements. Critic Steven Zultanski writes that Place, when asked to "explain the intent of her work [...] of course, refused to do so, which has partially allowed for the book’s retention of its initial provocative appeal." Poet Juliana Spahr wrote: "Does Vanessa’s book mean to suggest that rape is largely a socio-economic problem?" In 2014, George Mason University Professor David Kaufmann wrote: "When Juliana Spahr asks about Place’s alliances and intentions — a question that the text raises by its very nature — there is no answer that Place could give that could close the gulf the book opens up before its audience. Not knowing what the author intends us to do with this stuff, we don’t know what to make of it. We are here. The victims, the perps, and the survivors — they are over there, in more ways than one."

Gone with the Wind

Place also received criticism for a Twitter art project where she retyped the entire text from the 1936 novel Gone with the Wind in an effort to call attention to the novel's inherent racism, as part of a larger project, Gone with the Wind by Vanessa Place, designed to implicate questions of copyright, the ownership of cultural fictions, the ongoing nature of the white imaginary, and the function of antagonism in social media. According to Place's own artist statement about the project: The book's true love story is not between Rhett and Scarlett but white America's affair with self, a self that can only exist through owning property as the primary means of white supremacy."

The Twitter art project included a stereotypical African American mammy image as its banner. A film still of Hattie McDaniel as the character Mammy from the film version of the book was used as the account's profile picture. While some have argued that the account was meant to scrutinize and call attention to stereotyping and racism in Gone With the Wind, others accused it of being racist or insensitive itself, which resulted in calls "for University of Colorado Boulder to remove her from her summer teaching appointment,... that she be dis-invited from [an] upcoming Berkeley Poetry Conference," as well as a petition for Place's removal from the 2016 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference subcommittee.

Subsequently, the Berkeley Poetry Conference was cancelled, AWP removed Place from the subcommittee to satisfy concerns from its membership, and the Whitney Museum of American Art cancelled a planned performance from Place.

In her response to criticism surrounding the project, Place said: "I see art that’s sanitized, art that’s precious, art that’s playing safe, art for the market. People say they want transgression, that they’re looking for the radical edge, but I’m not so sure. There’s a certain amount of cruelty in what I do. There has to be. You have to touch nerves, otherwise it’s just entertainment."