This fall, Public Art Fund Talks at The New School examine the transformative potential of sculpture and its ability to reach beyond the material presence of an object’s physical form. Inspired by the influence of an earlier conceptual art legacy on contemporary sculptural practice, this series examines how the limits of an object might be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.

History is a part of every single action, every single thing that we do. We don’t choose it; it kind of chooses us… In being who we are, we are constantly sending these signals out to the world, and when you start to get a signal back—that is the thing that’s acknowledging our presence, our vision. And at that moment, that’s the point when you’ve chosen it. We’ve sent the signal out, the signal comes back to us, and at that moment we embody history and as we send these signals out its just showing that we’re aware of doing so.

-Matthew Day Jackson, The Brooklyn Rail, July-August 2011

Matthew Day Jackson explores the relationship between materials, myths, and recent history to create works that grapple with the nature of human experience, both personal and collective.  Jackson’s work utilizes an everyday iconography juxtaposed with an unknown archaeology of form to create “brave new worlds” of encounter in his works, whether he is working in sculpture, collage, video or photography.

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Born in 1974 in Panorama City, California, Matthew Day Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center; Princeton University Art Museum; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Hayward Gallery ; Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Barbican Gallery, London; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; 1st Athens Biennale; 2nd Moscow Biennale; 3rd Beijing Biennale; Herning Kunstmuseum; Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on October 20, 2011

New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has been called “America’s most important living art critic,” and “the unacknowledged dean of a bastard profession.” But is it? Schjeldahl takes on the challenge in a lecture/speech/manifesto he spent the summer burnishing for prime time at The New School for the 2011 International Art Critics Association/USA Distinguished Lecture. Like Wilde, he champions beauty in an era when it has been debased. He privileges personal confession over theory as the portal to comprehending art. “Paintings are vacations from myself,” according to the aggressively shy critic who started writing about art to support his poetry-writing habit. Schjeldahl has stipulated that the Q&A following his presentation be “open season,” in which the tables are turned and he readies himself for “questions, comments, and attacks.”

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Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He came to The New Yorker from The Village Voice, where he was the art critic from 1980 to 1998. Previously, he had written for The New York Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section. His writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Schjeldahl has received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association, for excellence in art criticism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of four books, including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings, which was published in 1991.

This is the fifth 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 U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Associations Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Posted on September 26, 2011

The second presentation in the spring Public Art Fund Talks at The New School series, New York Stories continues to explore the ongoing resonance of radical work created by artists who first came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s.

Artist Rob Pruitt speaks about The Andy Monument. His homage to Andy Warhol stands on a corner of 17th Street and Broadway, just as Warhol did when he signed and gave away copies of Interview magazine. Pruitt’s sculpture adapts and transforms the familiar tradition of classical statuary, and depicts Warhol as a ghostly, silver presence: a potent cultural force as both artist and self-created myth. Public Art Fund director and chief curator Nicholas Baume, cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, and artist and writer Rhonda Lieberman join the artist in a lively conversation about Warhol’s lasting influence on art and culture.

Posted on April 11, 2011

In collaboration with the School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics presents an evening of discussion on the work of John Knight. Curator Sabine Breitwieser, writer Anne Rorimer, art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and critic André Rottmann convene to examine the artist’s pivotal role in the development of institutional critique and site-specific art. Moderated by New School faculty member, Simonetta Moro, the panel takes place on the occasion of the opening of Knight’s exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery on April 7, 2011.

Since the early 1970s John Knight has dedicated his practice to mapping the intersections of art, design, and institutional power through a series of spatial interventions and graphic maneuvers. Following closely on the architectural implications of Minimalism, Knight belongs to a generation of artists including Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, and Dan Graham that has consistently addressed the ideological valences of constructed space. Working “in situ,” all of Knight’s projects address the specific demands of their context, whether it be the gallery, the museum, the library, or the commercial billboard. Recent projects include shows at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2009); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin (2009); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2008); Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló (2008).

Posted on March 31, 2011

The Photography Program in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design, The Aperture Foundation, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and The Shpilman Institute for Photography jointly present The Photographic Universe: A Conference. This two-day symposium brings together a range of leading photographers, scientists, theoreticians, historians, and philosophers from Parsons as well as other institutions, to reflect and discuss photography at a pivotal moment in its history.

The field of photography is constantly changing. Technologies, theories, and what constitutes a ‘photographer’ or a ‘photograph’ are prone to unending developments. In the last decade, this rapid transformation has only accelerated due to pervasive digitization. Quite possibly, photography is now in a similar place to where it was during the first few decades of its invention – a time when its emerging cultural significance quickly expanded due to innovative technological developments. Similarly, in the last two decades, we have seen an expanding definition of photography through the digital revolution, the Internet, and growing interest in new photographic processes and applications.

The Photographic Universe: A Conference reflects on this current moment. What is the importance of photography as a medium and a discipline, seen from the perspective of practitioners, users, pedagogues, technologists, historians and others? How can we evaluate contemporary culture within the expanding photographic field while speculating on the future of images? Prominent thinkers and practitioners discuss their roles in the expanding photographic field, evaluate its increasingly blurry relationship between art and life, and speculate on how photographic images will continue to change the way we see our world.

March 2 – Art and Philosophy
Charlotte Cotton & David Reinfurt , Andrea Geyer & Susie Linfield, Walter Benn Michaels & James Welling, Anne Collins Goodyear & Penelope Umbrico, Chris Boot & Susan Meiselas

March 3 – Science and Technology
Richard Benson & Frank Cost, Simone Douglas & Michael T. Jones, Anthony Aziz & Douglas Lanman, Wafaa Bilal & Virgina Rutledge, Trevor Paglen & Julia Bryan-Wilson

For more information, visit photographicuniverse.parsons.edu.

For video documentations of all the conversations that took place in the conference, visit vimeo.com/veralistcenter/videos.

Posted on February 3, 2011

ByProduct is a new book that assembles the commentaries of artists, activists, curators, and interdisciplinary thinkers on cultural projects “embedded” in industries, the government, and other non-art sectors. Situated deeply in such institutions – and incorporating their architecture, language and much else – these projects produce meaning contingent on their host, becoming a “byproduct” of their existence. Whether the works are explicitly polemical, indirectly critical or instrumentalized by the host institutions is up for debate, and evokes old and new questions around political efficacy, and tactical media.

Posted on December 1, 2010

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life.

In the 4th-century AD the Maya began writing exponentially large numbers to link historical dates to periods deep in time.  They used various glyphs and symbols to write these dates, symbols that include a dot for one and a bar for five and a stylized shell for zero within their positional base-twenty system.  The first known Maya zero dates back to AD 357, carved on a stone stela at Uaxactun, Guatemala.  Why Maya scribes wrote dates so deep in time and how they use, conceive, and visualize their zero has been the focus of Anna Blume’s archeological and ethno-historical research for the past eight years.

This event is paired with a lecture by artist with Josiah McElheny, presented on November 16, 2010.

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Anna Blume has been teaching and writing about art as a particular mediation between what can be seen and what remains un-seeable.  From this perspective, art, in its very making and existence, has within it a metaphysical component and a potentiality to exceed its own materiality towards expression both unleashed and unbound. Her field of research ranges from 6th-century sandstone rock cut temples in central Western India to 9th-century numerical Maya notations carved into limestone stelae. Blume received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University in 1997. She has taught at various art colleges in New York including Cooper Union, Parson’s School of Design, School of Visual Arts, and is currently Associate Professor of the History of Art at the State University of New York (FIT).  Supported by the Ford Foundation, State University of New York, and the American Philosophical Society, her research on Maya concepts of zero is forthcoming in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

Posted on November 30, 2010

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Okwui Enwezor’s lecture is entitled “On the Politics of Disaggregation: Notes on Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits.”

Far more than for any other part of his oeuvre, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles has become known for his project Insertions into Ideological Circuits from the early 1970s. In order to avoid censorship, Meireles printed images and messages onto various consumer items (such as recyclable Coca-Cola bottles) and bank notes already in wide circulation. Enwezor analyzes this body of work, maintaining that Meireles’ Insertions – like Jorge Luis Borges’ forking paths – operate at the gap between material flows, ideological structures, and nodes of value (symbolic, social, economic, political). The artist’s “insertions” are as much cuts inscribed on as they are breaks struck into formal structures of power, broadcast systems, and instruments of public transmission.

As Enwezor elaborates, “In tactical terms, the “insertions” represent the brutal scoring onto the sheets of public consciousness of the wild rumors of human existence caught in the grips of unaccountable power. Thus they are procedures of disaggregation carefully insinuated into spheres of everyday practice whether embodied in models of institutional totalization – for instance in the machineries of the State and multinational capital – or in the theological pieties of the church and family. In seeking to analyze and attack these scenes of production, communication, dissemination, and domination, Meireles in Inserções formulated the modalities of a counter-ideological discourse, one which through communicative action arrives at the address of its intended public by means of dispersal and detour into social structures and institutional systems.”

Enwezor’s talk follows two lectures on post-Fordism and artistic practices, delivered by sociologist Pascal Gielen and philosopher Michael Hardt on October 26.

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Okwui Enwezor is a curator, writer, and scholar. He is the founding publisher and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Since 2005 he is Adjunct Curator at International Center of Photography, New York and was previously Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Enwezor was Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute (2005-2009) and has held academic appointments as Visiting Professor in Art History at University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, New York, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Umea, Sweden. In 2011 he will deliver the Alain Leroy Locke Lectures at Harvard University, and in 2012, he will serve as Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Enwezor has served as the Artistic Director of several leading biennials and global exhibitions including the 2^nd Johannesburg Biennale (1996-1997); Documenta 11 (1998-2002); 2^nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain (2005-2006); and 7^th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2007-2008). He is currently Artistic Director of Meeting Points 6, a performance and visual arts project bringing together theater, dance, film, and contemporary art in eight Arab and European cities (Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, Tangier, Brussels, Berlin). Amongst Enwezor’s numerous exhibitions are The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, Museum Villa Stuck; Century City, Tate Modern, London; Mirror’s Edge, Bildmuseet, Umea; In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940-Present, Guggenheim Museum; Global Conceptualism, Queens Museum, New York and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Stan Douglas: Le Detroit, Art Institute of Chicago; David Goldblatt: Fifty One Years, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Center of Photography, New York; The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, Centro Andalucia de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, and Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, at International Center of Photography, New York. Some of his publications include Events of the Self: Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection (Steidl, 2010); Contemporary African Art Since 1980, with Chika Okeke-Agulu (Damiani Editore, 2009; Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (ICP/Steidl, 2008); Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Fink Verlag, 2002); as well as edited volumes Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity with Terry Smith and Nancy Condee (Duke University Press, 2008), and Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (INIVA and MIT Press, 1999). He is currently completing work on two historical exhibitions: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Bureaucracy, Institutions and Everyday Life; and Sun in their Eyes: Photography and the Invention of Africa, 1839-1939, as part of trilogy of exhibitions focusing on the African continent at the International Center of Photography, New York.

Posted on October 26, 2010

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

In a double lecture and discussion Pascal Gielen and Michael Hardt discuss the role and the functioning of the art world from a philosophical and a sociological perspective. Gielen describes the art scene as a perfect production unit for economic exploitation in the contemporary network society as he searches for possibilities for artistic freedom in our Post-Fordist work contexts. Michael Hardt responds and argues that the Post-Fordist context offers the possibility of art as biopolitical production. He is asking the question whether artistic skills and talents can be deployed in a democratic project of the defense, production and distribution of the common. This event is paired with a lecture by curator Okwui Enwezor, presented on November 2, 2010.

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Pascal Gielen is Professor of Sociology of the Arts at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. The director of the research group and book series Arts in Society, Gielen has written and co-authored several books on contemporary art, cultural heritage and cultural politics. In 2009, he edited the book Being An Artist in Post-Fordist Times (with Paul De Bruyne) and published The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude. Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Valiz). In 2010, Community Art and Beyond. The Political Potency of Trespassing was published (Valiz), also edited by De Bruyne and Gielen.

Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. With Antonio Negri he co-authored Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and CommonWealth (2009).

Posted on October 11, 2010

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today. Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years. Click here for information on Panel Discussion II.

Panel Discussion I
Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship
Have arts organizations modified their programming in the aftermath of the culture wars? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the commercial market relate to the issue of decency and community standards? What is the future of government funding for arts institutions and individual artists?

The panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause and culture wars over arts funding in general have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. A number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit – or are prepared to forfeit – government funding. Panelists include founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, leaders of art projects that have been supported by the NEA, and key figures in public art funding.

Moderated by Laura Flanders,GRITtv.

Posted on June 28, 2010

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today. Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years. Click here for information on Panel Discussion I.

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.

Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv.

Posted on June 10, 2010

The Fifth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture is delivered by Peter L. Galison, historian, writer, filmmaker and the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University. Galison was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, he won the Max Planck Prize in 1999, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1997.

In this lecture, Galison addresses speculation as it pertains to inaccessible sites, focusing on “nuclear wastelands” and “pure wilderness.” As they are usually understood, these designations are opposites; when they converge into nature preserves on the sites of decommissioned nuclear weapons lands we often describe this circumstance as “paradoxical” or “ironic.” Taking stock of plans to handle lands that will remain saturated with radionuclides for tens of thousands of years, Galison argues that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from dichotomous; that their relation is far more intriguing (and disturbing) than a binary of purity and corruption. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity – for reasons of environmental protection or destruction– alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans.

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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. Not unlike the speakers in this series –Stephanie Barron, Michael Brenson, Boris Groys, Linda Nochlin, and now Peter L. Galison – McDonald Moore brought to his students the vision of an artist who is also a scholar, and his classes were famously popular. His students, family, and friends established this lecture series in 2000.

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Peter L. Galison is a historian, writer, filmmaker and the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, among them Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1998) won the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society. His book Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time (2003) was one of the first to draw close links between the young German physicist Albert Einstein and the French mathematician Henri Poincaré who made parallel attempts to harness time and helped create the science of relativity. He co-wrote Objectivity (2007) with his colleague Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Their book examines how the idea of scientific objectivity evolved from the 17th century to the present day from the study of curiosities, through the representations of perfect, notional specimens, to a concept of objectivity as responsibility for science. He is currently finishing another book, Building Crashing Thinking, about technologies that reform the self.

Galison has been involved in the production of two documentary films. The first, The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma, was about the political and scientific decisions behind the creation of the first hydrogen bomb in the United States, and premiered on the History Channel in 2000. The second film, Secrecy, co-directed with Harvard filmmaker Robb Moss, is about the costs and benefits of government secrecy, and premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Galison is beginning a new feature documentary film on nuclear landscapes. Like his scholarly work, these films ultimately address how the tools and techniques used to visualize scientific information influence our understanding of science, and the course of scientific research itself.

*Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2011 focus theme “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on June 7, 2010

Friendship and hospitality frame a series of conversations this spring, presented jointly by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Bachelor’s Program at The New School for General Studies. Each evening features a faculty member from The New School who introduces their best friend—a prominent figure outside of The New School, and coming from a field different from the one of the host. Friendship and hospitality serve as more than framing devices: they are engaged in a variety of ways, and each pair is free to choose their approach in elaborating on the story of their friendship. The evening has a strong social element. The audience is invited to mix, eat, and drink—gestures of hospitality are extended to all present.

Participants I-Hsien Wu, Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature whose interests include modern Chinese literature, as well as Chinese music theory and modern ethnomusicology, will host Sandrine Larrive-Bass, an art historian whose research interests focus on early China art history and archaeology.

Posted on April 5, 2010

A three-day event explores the radical oeuvre of British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew and the activities of the Scratch Orchestra (co-founded by him in 1969), and illuminates their significance today as artistic, pedagogical and political tools. Workshops, sound installations, a film screening, and an exhibition bring together historians, musicians, artists, and New School faculty and students, and are presented at The New School. Among the participants are contemporary music ensemble Either/Or, artists Luke Fowler and Robert Sember, and New School faculty members Danielle Goldman, Sarah Montague, Simonetta Moro, Evan Rapport and Ivan Raykoff and their students. Pianist and Cardew biographer John Tilbury is contributing a (pre-recorded) Call-to-Action.

Inspired by The Cardew Object at the ICA London (November 2009), these events are organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of its 2009-2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.” Vera List Center Fellow Robert Sember, a member of the sound-art collective Ultra-red and the School of Echoes, leads the colloquium and workshops in collaboration with faculty members from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. DAY THREE PROGRAM Exhibition The Skybridge Art & Sound Space Opening Reception: Thursday, April 15, 2010 – 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Exhibition Dates: Thursday, April 15 to Monday, May 10, 2010 Skybridge Gallery, Eugene Lang College, 65 West 11th Street, 3rd floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street) Admission: Free New School faculty Sarah Montague and Simonetta Moro and their students in the Skybridge Curatorial Project present an exhibition celebrating Cardew’s work and the events above. The Skybridge Art & Sound Space hosts multi-media exhibitions and curriculum-based projects in the arts, showcasing student projects that make the space a vibrant and exciting laboratory for visual, aural, and critical thinking. __________________________________________________________________ Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) was a seminal figure of the British avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. A student of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and a follower of John Cage, he formed the Scratch Orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1969 in London. Based on their experiments, Cardew published the book Scratch Music, now a classic resource for experimental musicians. In the late 1970s, Cardew became increasingly involved in a Marxist-Leninist discourse, eventually rejecting his own compositional work as elitist. Cardew died in an unresolved hit-and-run accident at the age of forty-five, estranged from most of his colleagues and challenged for his political convictions.

The Scratch Orchestra was a collaborative group of musically trained and untrained participants engaged in radical modes of improvisatory and cross-disciplinary art-making. In an effort to liberate performers from the constraints of traditional music notation as well, Cardew developed elaborate forms of graphic notation – all part of an explicit agenda of political consciousness and social action. These larger “ways of organizing,” including interpretations of two sections from Cardew’s The Great Learning (1968-71), are presented during The New School events in a structured environment that invites creative engagement and collaboration. __________________________________________________________________

Posted on March 31, 2010

This panel discussion examines the viability of the conventionally printed and published book —monographic, serial, facsimile, high-value, low-budget, no-budget, and otherwise—as a means of artistic production in view of digital media. At a time of mass convergence, when much of the social experience is structured by virtual, electronic means, how might the physical and material residue of small-scale publications distinguish themselves from a space apart for resistance and subjectivity? Moderated by Gil Blank, the panel includes artists Roe Ethridge and Collier Schorr, alongside with James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff of Primary Information.

The Aperture Foundation, publisher of Aperture magazine, is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to the support and advancement of photography as a fine art. In collaboration with the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons Confounding Expectations XI is generously supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Henry Nias Foundation, the ASMP Fund, and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. The lecture series has been hosted by The New School since 2001.

Posted on March 29, 2010

Thirty years on from Rosalind Krauss’ seminal text Sculpture in the Expanded Field, a panel of artists and critics reconsiders the concept of the “expanded field” in light of contemporary art production. Co-sponsored by SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the discussion reflects upon how performative, discursive, and design models developed since the essay’s publication may have shifted the formal, political, and semiological parameters of sculpture today.

Posted on March 11, 2010

“The idea of monument and death
is the ultimate raw material of art.”

– Huma Bhabha

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The second speaker in the series is Huma Bhabha. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Bhabha  (b. 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, lives in Poughkeepsie) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1985), and her MFA from Columbia University, New York (1989). In 2008, she was awarded the Emerging Artist Award from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.  She has had solo exhibitions at Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France, 2009; and Salon 94, New York, NY, 2007.  Her work has been presented in group exhibitions including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY, 2009; and After-Nature, The New Museum, New York, NY, 2008. Bhabha is represented by Salon 94, New York.

Posted on March 11, 2010

“Our generation sees modernist art through the lens of pop culture, not the other way around.” — Thomas Houseago

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The last speaker in the series is Thomas Houseago. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Houseago (b. 1972 in Leeds, England, lives in Los Angeles) studied at Jacob Kramer Foundation College, Leeds (1991) and got his BA from St. Martin’s School of Art, London (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Thomas Houseago, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2009; Thomas Houseago: Ode, Galleria Zero, Milan, 2009; Herald St, London, 2008. He has also participated in group shows including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Beg Borrow and Steal, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, 2009; and Construct and Dissolve, Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, 2009. Houseago is represented by Michael Werner Gallery, New York.

Posted on March 11, 2010

“It’s interesting to see how
inanimate the figure can be, how
figurative art dies, how it scars,
how it shatters into mere things,
how it turns to dust…”

– Matthew Monahan

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The first speaker of the series is Matthew Monahan. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Monahan (b. 1972 in Eureka, California, lives in Los Angeles) received his BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Modern Art, London, 2009; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2008; Focus: Matthew Monahan, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. He has participated in group exhibitions including: Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 2008; Unmonumental, New Museum, New York, 2007; Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006. Monahan is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Posted on March 9, 2010

CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Posted on February 22, 2010

Held in conjunction with The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ exhibitions “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968″ and “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy,” the Vera List Center and the Bronx Museum present a panel discussion with photographer Julian Cox, curator of African American culture and of the exhibition “Road to Freedom”; Doris Derby, a Bronx-born, Atlanta-based photographer of the movement whose work is included in this exhibition; photographer Eric Etheridge; artist LeRoy Henderson; curator and gallery owner Steven Kasher, and artist Nadine Robinson. Moderated by Deborah Willis, Chair and Professor of the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

During the span of twelve years, a series of events, later hailed as the Civil Rights Movement, forever changed the social and political course of America. From March 28 to July 11, 2010, The Bronx Museum of the Arts will present two sweeping exhibitions that chronicle both these pivotal moments in the nation’s history and their legacy surveyed through the works of young African-American artists. The first, “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968,” features 150 vintage photographs, images that not only exposed rampant acts of discrimination in America’s past, but also revealed shinning glimpses of equality and unity amongst its citizens. The second, smaller exhibition, “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy,” includes works by seven African-American emerging artists and collectives – all born in or after 1968 – who have created new work examining the heritage of the Civil Rights Movement and its affect on the lives of this new generation. Both exhibitions were organized by The High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Posted on December 17, 2009

The Vera List atrium and courtyard adjacent to the landmark Alvin Johnson Building harbor evidence of the history, memory, patronage and institutional identity of The New School–through an eclectic collection of significant art works. They range from Chaim Gross’ Acrobats Family of Five from 1951 and Gonzalo Fonseca’s ceramic tile mural from 1959-1961 to Martin Puryear’s seating arrangements (1997) and the 2008 addition to Dave Muller’s Interpolations and Extrapolations, a meditation on New School graphic identity.

In this conversation, Silvia Rocciolo, Curator of The New School Art Collection, and John Wanzel, Curatorial Assistant and MFA in Fine Arts candidate consider the role of The New School Art Collection as a living archive and how it reinforces institutional narrative and identity through its physical presence. Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Posted on October 7, 2009

Produced in collaboration with students and The New School Art Collection, the collection guides provide a select self-guided tour of those works in the collection that relate to the center’s annual theme.

Public Domain collection guide, 2006-07 (PDF)
Agency collection guide, 2007-08 (PDF)

Posted on September 20, 2009

Since the 1930s, artist-instructors such as Berenice Abbott, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Lewis Mumford, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Ralph Pearson have brought a resolve of professionalism to The New School. Legendary art historian Meyer Schapiro’s lectures of 1936-1952 thrilled a generation with their sense of philosophical dialogue. Painter Robert Motherwell said, “It was in order to study with Meyer Schapiro that I came to New York.” Since then, The New School has hosted international art luminaries from Joseph Beuys to John Currin to Trisha Donnelly. Yet, the institution now finds itself at a crossroads of purpose and identity. How should it go forward in art education? What is “academic” and what is “professional”? What has the university been doing right? What has the university been doing wrong? Artist-instructor John Zinsser hosts an open discussion with current and former New School students, asking questions essential to the ongoing mission of the arts at The New School.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Posted on September 20, 2009