Through his website, disorientations, monographic writings, and teaching, Travis Jeppesen has been experimenting with a method called “object-oriented writing,” a practice of perceiving and writing that attempts to inhabit the object rather than merely react to it. In formulating his work, he has been influenced by the speculative realist movement, the art writing of Gertrude Stein, Roland Barthes, and classical Chinese aesthetics.
Travis Jeppesen is an art critic, novelist, and poet. His books include Victims, Wolf at the Door, and two volumes of poetry. In 2008, he published Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the “Contemporary” (Social Disease Publishing), a book collecting his writings on central and eastern European art, which was named Nonfiction Book of the Year by 3am Magazine, as well as launching disorientations, a one-man art magazine. His play, Daddy, premiered in Berlin in June 2009 at the HAU Theater and was directed by Ron Athey. His writings on art have appeared in Artforum, Flash Art, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Dazed & Confused, and Art in America, among others. Jeppesen currently lives and works in Berlin and London, where he teaches at the Royal College of Art.