Thingness of Energy is a mixed media art installation by Jamie Kruse, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in the lobby of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, a glass-enclosed gallery opening onto Fifth Avenue. It serves as the physical and virtual hub for long-term discussions as well as temporary interactions, events and happenings on The New School’s energy use and its economic, environmental, ethical, urban and artistic implications.

With unprecedented access to the university’s infrastructure and support staff, Kruse has spent six months investigating the flow of energy through various New School buildings. The outcome of her research is a complex, intricate and fragile assemblage of the physical components of energy. The installation is made up of the material conduits of energy – the pipes, wires, switch boxes and tubes through which it flows – as well as samples of some of the energy sources themselves (fossil fuels and coal) in addition to maps and photographs. Mounted on the building’s membrane, i.e. its windows, the installation is visible from both the street and the building’s interior underscoring the correlation between producer of energy – the outside – to consumer of energy – the people in the building.

Energy materials and flows are often hidden in basements or invisibly channeled through pipes and wires. Thingness of Energy is a provocation to consider and directly experience the material realities of energy. Taking The New School’s Climate Action Plan as its point of departure, the project reveals the deep geologic nature and effects of the materials we use to generate and transmit energy. And it underscores the power of deep time – both past and future – as a generator of energy forms and effects.

At its core, Thingness of Energy poses the question: what if “anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect” became a common design specification for energy production and distribution, policy-making, and infrastructure design?

The presentation is accompanied by several public programs, among them an installation walkthrough and facilities tour on Thursday, February 23, 12:30 p.m. (RSVP required: vlc@newschool.edu) and an energy-driven exchange among New School faculty members from different programs, on Monday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.

The opening reception coincides with other openings at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Where Do We Migrate To?, curated by Niels Van Tomme.

For further information, visit
www.veralistcenter.org/kruse
http://smudgestudio.org/smudge/Thingness.html

For inquiries regarding artist-led tours or public classes, please contact vlc@newschool.edu.

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Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer and independent scholar. In 2006 she co-founded (with Elizabeth Ellsworth) smudge studio, based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Recent projects include Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York. Exhibitions have been presented at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Incident Report, Hudson, New York. She has been granted residencies with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT; Sundance Preserve; the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Kruse is the author of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog.

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Thingness of Energy is an art project by Jamie Kruse, developed and produced in collaboration with The New School’s Office for Sustainability, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The project is supported, in part, by The New School’s Green Fund and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

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

Designed by artists Melanie Crean and Claire Picher, the Building Better Speech workshops investigate how issues of identity and power can be communicated as a form of text, either through the body’s gestures, or through network-based collective action. Building Better Speech workshops make use of performance, games, and open education models to collaboratively facilitate dialogue around issues defined by groups affected by political transformation and upheaval.

In the pilot iteration of Building Better Speech, a workshop has been designed with a group of female high school students from Turning Point for Women and Families, a Queens-based organization that supports Muslim American families dealing with issues of domestic violence. Over the course of the workshop, the young women first identify and then explore issues of faith and stereotypes through automatic writing assignments, serigraphy, theatrical games, reflection, and discussion. These various methods are a means of improving communication within groups and building ties to allies, as well as promoting mutual understanding. Physical and visual approaches to communication augment the spoken word to help overcome the greatest obstacle to communicating: the challenge of being heard.

On the occasion of Performa 11, and hosted by the Performa Institute, Crean, Picher and the young women of Turning Point for Women and Families will conduct an open workshop, inviting the public to explore issues of stereotyping and identity in a shared session of collective performance games.

The project is developed in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, and presented as part of the Performa Institute, a research and educational initiative of Performa 11.

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.

Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Sheila C. Johnson Center for Design at Parsons celebrate the 99th Annual Conference of the College Art Association, with a reception and workshop featuring the artistic entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture is both a book launch for Gregory Sholette’s new work of the same title, and a concrete application of the principles laid out in the book. The book argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate and thrive in the non-commercial sector. It examines the political economy of art and business by highlighting interventionist and collective art as the ‘dark matter’ of the art world. This dark matter is indispensable to the survival of mainstream culture which it frequently opposes.

Two projects are lifted from the book’s pages and installed installed in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center lobby for passerby to participate.

Boston-based artist Cat Mazza offers a craftivism workshop, based on the work of her organization MicroRevolt. MicroRevolt projects investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor.

New York-based artist Jim Costanzo calls for the 2nd Whiskey Rebellion: A Distillation of American Spirit. The original Whiskey Rebellion was a tax protest in Pennsylvania in the 1790s, during the presidency of George Washington. The conflict was rooted in western dissatisfaction with a 1791 excise tax on whiskey. The tax was a part of treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton’s program to centralize and fund the national debt. Costanzo is acting on behalf of the Aaron Burr Society which has begun to distill whiskey without a license, in an act of flagrant civil disobedience.

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 this lecture, artist Josiah McElheny introduces two works, both titled Island Universe and both connected to an ongoing collaboration with astrophysicist David Weinberg (Ohio State University). One is a large-scale sculptural installation, and the other is a film shot on location at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The visual depiction of time is at the core of McElheny’s talk, but he also describes how he sees the history of science echoing the history of politics – in ways both sublime and absurd.

Island Universe, the film, had its U.S. premiere at the Museum of Modern Art on November 8, 2010. An excerpt will be screened during this lecture.

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Josiah McElheny is a New York-based sculptor, performance artist, and filmmaker best known for his use of glass with other materials. He has written for such publications as Artforum and Cabinet, and is a contributing editor to Bomb and a 2006 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. He has had recent one-person museum exhibitions at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of international institutions includ­ing the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago di Compostela; and Tate Modern, London. His artist books include The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart’s “The Light Club of Batavia” (University of Chicago Press, 2010), The Metal Party (Public Art Fund and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2002), and An Historical Anecdote About Fashion (Henry Art Gallery, 1999). Recently he has been a Senior Critic at Yale University School of Art.

In the United States, the AIDS crisis is now almost completely within the control of public health management systems. Through global NGOs, we have exported our programs for managing this epidemic, along with US public health ideologies that downplay or avoid politically sensitive concerns with sexual rights (such as the rights of commercial sex workers), harm reduction (such as drug legalization and needle exchange), and the oppression of racial and sexual minorities (in the form of multi-generational poverty, incarceration). Increasing infection rates among poor women, rural populations, and young men of color who have sex with men and the inability of many around the world to access affordable, life-saving treatments remind us that social violence and structural inequalities are not resolved by the efficient management of the epidemic.

As long as this global health structure remains in place, the AIDS crisis is always still beginning. Film screening of Jean Carlomusto’s award-winning film Sex Is An Epidemic (2010), followed by an open discussion on how to organize against the AIDS crisis.

The sound-art collective Ultra-red is concerned with the intersection of sound and politics. Collective listening procedures serve as foundation of their exhibition Vogue’ology (at Parsons’ Aronson Gallery, November 17 through 30) which examines the possibilities for establishing an archive of the House/Ballroom community. These procedures have been deployed by the exhibition’s curatorial and archive teams to process and select fragments and phrases from House/Ballroom oral histories and vogue descriptions for the exhibition. Their interpretation will be further provoked and utilized to encourage visitors to move through the exhibition space. On occasion of Vogue’olgy, members of Ultra-red consider this intersection of sound and politics in a public event with artists, union organizers, historians and representatives of Ballroom ministries. The audience is invited to engage with sound as an object of reflection and with listening as a means of political organizing.

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

This fall, the Public Art Fund Talks series presents three artists who all transform the conventional lecture into a unique work of art. These hybrid performance-lectures provide a window into each artist’s practice and present viewers with a new way of experiencing their art. Using live video and dialogue, Pawel Althamer creates a live sculpture workshop with the audience, extending the collaborative approach that has defined much of his work. Born in 1967 in Warsaw, Poland, Pawel Althamer graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, where he studied in the Department of Sculpture. In 2004, he received the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His recent solo exhibitions include Pawel Althamer und Andere, Secession, Vienna (2009); One of Many, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2007); Black Market, neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2007); and Au Centre Pompidou, Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006). Recent group exhibitions include 8^th Gwangju Biennale, 10,000 Lives, Gwangju (2010); The Science of Imagination, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2010); Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010); and The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking Spaces, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2008). He is represented by the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Pawel Althamer currently lives and works in Warsaw.

This fall, the Public Art Fund Talks series presents three artists who all transform the conventional lecture into a unique work of art.  These hybrid performance-lectures provide a window into each artist’s practice and present viewers with a new way of experiencing their art. In his New York debut, Simon Fujiwara, using live video and dialogue, loosely retells his parents’ life as erotic fiction in Welcome to the Hotel Munber.

Born in 1982 in London, United Kingdom, Simon Fujiwara studied architecture at Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK (2005) and Fine Art at Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2008). Current and recent exhibitions include 29th Sao Paulo Biennale, San Paulo (2010); Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); The Collectors, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice (2009); Art Basel Statements, Basel (2010); and Huckleberry Finn, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2010). Forthcoming exhibitions include a multi-part performance series curated by Jens Hoffman for Performa 11, New York (2011) and a major solo survey exhibition at TATE St.Ives, UK.  He is this year’s winner of both the prestigious Baloise Prize, Art Basel 41 and the Frieze Cartier Award 2010 and is nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize, Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev. He is represented by Gio Marconi, Milan and Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main. Simon Fujiwara lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City.