Artist Daniel Hill’s “Reading Masculinity” turned Kim’s “Male Bodies Unmade” into a daily act of contemplation, quiet resistance, and queer visibility.
Vienna-based artist Daniel Hill performed a piece entitled Reading Masculinity (2024) at Neuer Platz in Austria’s capital. Each day for a month, Hill read Professor Jongwoo Jeremy Kim’s book Male Bodies Unmade in this public space steeped in European history, along with one other book (David Getsy’s Queer Behavior). The performance was then turned into a video work, now posted on Youtube.
Hill describes the work as an “extended public intervention,” placing a gesture of softness and reflection within a space marked by monuments to heroic masculinity. He read aloud while the city’s hourly webcam captured his presence. Blending performance, surveillance, and archival imagery, the piece invites viewers to consider how queer, male-presenting bodies are perceived and recorded in public space, and what it means to read — literally and metaphorically — against dominant narratives of gender and power.