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.”

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.