British artist Ryan Gander will launch the fall 2010 Public Art Fund Talks series with one of his celebrated Loose Associations presentations. In the form of a narrated PowerPoint, the artist will string together a series of images, memories, facts, and histories in a hybrid performance-lecture.

These intense and sometimes comedic presentations have taken place across Europe, most recently as part of Art Basel’s new “Art Parcours” project. Gander’s first public art commission entitled The Happy Prince will also be on view at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park this fall, beginning September 15, 2010. This new work, reminiscent of an ancient ruin, depicts the final moments of Oscar Wilde’s beloved children’s story.

Twenty years after the institution of the Decency Clause, a controversial funding requirement introduced by the National Endowment of the Arts in 1990, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions evaluating the stifling legacy of the Decency Clause and its impact on our culture.

Panel Discussion I
Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship

This panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause may have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. Rather than adhere to “common standards of decency,” a number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit the potential of NEA funding. Have organizations modified their programming due to the decency clause? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the emergence of the commercial market relate to the issue of decency? The panelists come from both sides: founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, and contemporary art projects that have been supported by the NEA.

Twenty years after the institution of the Decency Clause, a controversial funding requirement introduced by the National Endowment of the Arts in 1990, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions evaluating the stifling legacy of the Decency Clause and its impact on our culture.

Panel Discussion II
Decency, Respect and Community Standards: What Offends Us Now?

This panel looks at changing attitudes towards notions of decency over the past twenty years. It addresses how representations of nudity and sexuality have changed in contemporary art, and proposes a redefinition of what is considered offensive or inappropriate under our current political climate. The panel brings together artists whose work provoked the culture wars twenty years ago and those who deal with taboo topics today.

Vogue-ology contains elements which may seem incompatible: aesthetic experience and political activism; community events and forensic activities; public manifestations and private workshops. It is an exhibition presented at Parsons The New School for Design November 17 through 29, 2010, and highlights one of the least understood creative expressions – the dance form of Vogue – practiced usually by one of the most disenfranchised segments of American society, transgender and gay African-American and Latino men and women. Assertive and thriving, vogueing epitomizes the intersection of the personal and the political.

Inspired by poses in Vogue magazine, vogueing emerged in the early sixties and is now a performance genre most commonly associated with the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” directed by Jennie Livingston or Madonna’s song and video “Vogue” of the same year. Still largely performed by the artistic and social LGBT house/ballroom community in tightly scripted competitions, vogueing enacts class, gender and racial identities. Stylistic shifts register the community’s ongoing social analysis and history of struggle.

Reflective of the curatorial triumvirate at its helm – a member of the house/ballroom scene, a curator and an artist – the exhibition is an aesthetic experience as well as a study of methodologies, in particular participatory, sound-based strategies. Through analysis and codification of vogueing, the show will guide the development of a house/ballroom archive and an advocacy and community service organization.

Curators:

Arbert Santana Evisu, member of House of Evisu
Carin Kuoni, Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Robert Sember, member of Ultra-red sound art collective, Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellow

In awarding New York Times art critic Holland Cotter the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the Pulitzer Committee citation noted his “acute observation, luminous writing [and] dramatic story telling.” In his AICA/USA Distinguished Critic talk the critic known for the range and deep humanity of his concerns will address his roundabout route to art criticism, his response to the predominant modes of art criticism he found in place, the increasing limitations of that model, and how he imagines it could be changed and expanded. This is the fourth AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism.  It is presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Associations Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts.  There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture.  AICA/USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.

Historian, philosopher and filmmaker Peter L. Galison delivers the fifth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture. Galison is Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. He is author of several books among them Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1998) and Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (2003), and the producer of two films, The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (2000) and Secrecy (2008). In 1997, Peter Galison was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Named after one of the university’s most influential art history teachers, this lecture series honors John McDonald Moore’s contribution to the university’s intellectual life. Moore taught art history and criticism at The New School from 1968 until his death in 1999. His classes were famously popular for bringing the vision of an artist who is also a scholar to his students.

Word and image driven, the VLC public programs cross disciplines, institutions and geographies and bring together artists, scholars, policy makers, and activists for lectures, panel discussions, roundtables, and the occasional performance. Switchboard documents these programs in various ways. Many of our spring events are now available on Vimeo. Revisit some of our lectures and discussions in the 2009-2010 Speculating on Change cycle, such as The Cardew Object, The Democratic Trilemma, the series My Best Friends, or the tales of The Storyteller.

We are preparing our fall programs. Please visit Vimeo to view past events from the 2009-2010 Speculating on Change cycle.

2009-2010 Vera List Center fellow Robert Sember and the sound collective Ultra-red facilitate a presentation and discussion between members of New York City’s House/Ballroom community and the New School’s Gender Studies Committee, whose members are invested in organizing cultural activities around issues of gender and sexual rights and redefining gender studies pedagogy.

The House/Ballroom community is an artistic kinship and social movement of primarily transgender and queer African-American and Latino men and women. Vogue’ology refers to the House/Ballroom community’s mimetic performance form, Vogue, originally inspired by poses in Vogue magazine. The New School’s Gender Studies has recently celebrated its return to the university program, dedicating itself to gender scholarship from the last four decades in the United States and the rest of the world.

The session involves processes of organized listening to pre-recorded elements and testimony presented by representatives from both groups. The sound objects and statements articulate the conditions under which both initiatives are unfolding and suggest terms and themes to guide future initiatives. The terms articulated in the course of listening are open for comment and debate by all.

In January 2009, artist and Parsons faculty member Melanie Crean launched The Shape of Change, an ongoing project consisting of two interconnected works that examine the ephemeral nature of change, independence and the formation of identity. The first work tracks change on an international scale on the Web site www.shapeofchange.com, an online archive of American and Iraqi desires for political change. Through the presentation and visualization of  opinions of artists, writers and the general public, this part of The Shape of Change seeks to countermand the empty political brand that the term ‘change’ was reduced to in recent American and Iraqi elections.

The second project looks at change on a personal scale, documenting an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, thus establishing itself as an independent social subject. In this conversation, scholars and practitioners from the fields of art, science and religion discuss how their concepts of change both correspond and differ.

Participants:

AA Bronson is an artist and healer living and working in New York City. In the sixties, he left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. In 1969 he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal; for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, in addition to undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, and countless temporary public art projects. In 1974 they founded Art Metropole, Toronto, a distribution center and archive for artists’ books, audio, and video. From 1987 through 1994, they focused their work on the subject of AIDS. He is currently the President of Printed Matter, Inc., in New York City, and Artistic Director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

Melanie Crean is Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design, teaching classes in experimental time-based work, mobile media and gaming. As the former Director of Production at Eyebeam, she founded a studio that worked with socially based moving image, sound, public art and open source software. She designed special effects at MTV Digital Television Lab and produced documentaries in Nepal, on subjects that include women trafficking and the spread of HIV along trucking routes. Crean has received commissions from Art in General, Bronx Arts Council, Harvestworks, NYFA, NYSCA, Rhizome and Creative Time.

Sensei Jules Shuzen Harris is a Soto priest who has been practicing Buddhism for more than twenty-five years. He holds an Ed.D. with a concentration in applied human development from Teachers College of Columbia University and a MSW from New York University. As a psychotherapist, Shuzen has found creative ways to synthesize Western psychology and Zen to achieve dramatic results with his patients. He also focuses on the relationship between Zen and the martial arts. He is a fourth-degree Dan Black Belt in Iaido (the art of drawing and cutting with a samurai sword) and a Black Belt in Kendo (Japanese fencing). He also founded two schools of Japanese swordsmanship in Albany, NY and Salt Lake City, UT.

Alaa Majeed is a reporter, producer, and translator. She received her BA from Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Majeed has co-produced segments for Al-Jazeera International and PBS. She has also reported for United Press International, Pacifica Radio, the BBC, National Public Radio, “60 Minutes,”and The Sunday Times (London). Her experience as a translator includes work with news services, conducting/translating classes for Iraqi civil servants, and a position with Nature Iraq, a non-governmental, environmental organization. She is currently also working as a researcher, monitoring news wires, documenting press freedom violations, and conducting investigative interviews with journalists overseas for the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York. In 2007, she received the International Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Presented as part of Streaming Culture / Art & Politics, a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor, UCLA, and Director of Research, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/parsons-the-new-school-for-design