The Aperture Foundation, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and the Photography program at Parsons The New School for Design present a special screening of The Forgotten Space, a film by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch. The evening concludes with a conversation with Sekula, scholar Kristin Ross and independent film curator Chi-hui Yang.

The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks; listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China—whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. In Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, are somehow obsolete.

A range of materials is used: descriptive documentary, interviews, archive stills and footage, and clips from old movies. The result is an essayistic, visual documentary about one of the most important processes that affects us today. The Forgotten Space is based on Sekula’s book Fish Story (1995), seeking to understand and describe the contemporary maritime world in relation to the complex, symbolic legacy of the sea.

Organized as forum for people and things, the presentations are set in a theatrical arena arranged around a number of disputed objects. Introductions by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman.

Roundtable I
Forensic Architecture
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Buildings are both sensors and agents. They materialize political and economical forces, and also the events that befall them. Buildings undergo constant formal transformations in response to forces. They expand and contract with temperature and with the slow degeneration of their component materials, registering transformation in humidity, air quality, CO2 levels, salinity, seismic movements – and sometimes also the abrupt or violent events that target them or simply happen next to them. Some of these processes can be reconstructed through structural calculations, blast analyses, and the determination of the failure points of structures, details, and forms.

Participants:
Nikolaus Hirsch, Städelschule, Frankfurt a.M., Germany, moderator
Eve Hinman, Hinman Consulting Engineers, New York/San Francisco
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University
Norman Weiss, GSAPP, Columbia University

Lunch Break 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

Roundtable II
Constructed Evidence: The Thing Makes Its Forum
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

What if the object is not a “witness” but an entity constructed for the express purpose of creating, or activating, the forum? Such an object might map the diffused networks of informal or illegal labor, or be called upon to narrate historical events in the absence of evidentiary materials. In fact, the object may be the very thing that produces a forum where none previously existed. An artwork likewise produces its constituency; it gathers, rather than simply assumes an already extant audience. If the object, conceptualized as such, is not that which registers the events that came before it in the manner of the classical witness, then it might be said the object itself becomes the event to which the forum as witness will address itself.

Participants:
Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths, University of London, moderator
Amber Horning, John Jay College, New York
Sara Jordeno, artist, New York
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design
Arne Svenson, artist, New York

Roundtable III
Animism
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

In the habituated scheme of modernity, objects are conceived as the passive stuff on which human action leaves its imprint or trace. Whenever this passive/active nexus between objects and subject, humans and the non-human is disturbed or even reversed – as in the coming-to-life of seemingly dead matter, the becoming autonomous of inert things – we inevitably step into the territory of animism: that non-modern worldview that conceives of things as animated and possessing agency. With regards to Forensic Aesthetics, the historical discourse of animism provides a foil for a reflection on the boundaries at stake. This session examines a series of objects and liminal cases in which those borders are being destabilized or transgressed, from the crystal ball to educational objects from the 1920s, via the forensics of hair, to rocks.

Participants:
Anselm Franke, moderator
Brigid Doherty, Princeton University
Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University
Hugh Raffles, The New School for Social Research

Closing Remarks
5:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Tyler School of Art, Architecture Department, Temple University

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY ONE schedule.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

While legal and cultural scholars have labeled the third part of the 20th century – with its particular attention to testimony – as the “era of the witness,” the emergence of forensics in legal forums and popular entertainment signifies a new attention to the communicative capacity, agency, and power of things. This material approach is evident in the ubiquitous role that science and technologies now play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating. Today’s legal and political decisions are often based upon the capacity to display and read DNA samples, 3D laser scans, nanotechnology, and the enhanced vision of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance. From mass graves to retinal scans, the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed buildings, forensics is not only about the diagnostics, but also about the rhetoric of persuasion. The aesthetic dimension of forensics includes its means of presentation, the theatrics of its delivery, the forms of image and gesture. The forensic aesthetics of the present carries with it grave political and ethical implications, spreading its impact across socioeconomic, environmental, scientific, and cultural domains.

Etymologically, forensics refers to the “forum,” and to the practice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. Forensics has always been part of rhetoric, but its domain includes not only human speech but also that of objects. In forensic rhetoric, objects can address the forum. Because objects do not speak for themselves, there is a need for “translation” or “interpretation” – forensic rhetoric requires a person or a set of technologies to mediate between the object and the forum, to present the object, interpret it and place it within a larger net of relations.

The lectures and roundtable discussions by the participating artists, scholars and curators investigate these issues in a series of “forums” organized around a number of disputed objects.

Follow the links to detailed event schedules: DAY ONE and DAY TWO.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Coney Island USA and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School present a roundtable discussion focusing on how artists and art organizations have taken lead roles in the economic redevelopment of New York City and other urban centers. Leaders of local arts organizations from the Bronx, Coney Island, Gowanus, and the Lower East Side discuss how small business creation and community outreach contribute to economic development.

Arts organizations have long been identified as ideal partners for redeveloping neighborhoods seeking interim plans, due to their ability to draw crowds, activate storefronts, and launch activities in a relatively fast-paced manner. Concerned community leaders and local arts organizers consider how the arts have transformed their communities, and how these transformation yield new ways of  government and arts organization partnerships for economic redevelopment and neighborhood preservation in New York City and nationwide.

Moderated by Kevin McQueen, Assistant Director, Community Development Finance Lab, Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy.

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).

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.

Artist Mel Chin discusses the philosophical and conceptual development of selected works, in relation to the notion of sustainability. For more than three decades, Chin has been developing a unique and socially engaged body of work in which cultural diversity and global solidarity played an important role. His project Revival Field, perhaps his most well-known work, has made him one of the most important pioneers of ecological art. His works have been defined “sculptural witnesses to ecological and political tragedies.” Whether examining American imperialism in Central America, September 11, the fate of the Native American Indians, civil wars in postcolonial Africa, abuse at Guantanamo Bay, the extinction of animal species, or the way in which people pollute the natural world, Chin’s practice creates an arena in which social and (geo)political activism are coupled with ideas from philosophy, biology, history, religion, anthropology, literature, and alchemy. Chin received a BA from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1975, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and 1990. He lives in North Carolina.

]]> http://www.veralistcenter.org/currentprograms/?p=1915 Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:33:41 +0000 http://www.veralistcenter.org/?p=1915 Tuesday, October 26, 2010 – 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Preceded by book signing and reception from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design
2 West 13th Street at 5th Avenue
Free

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…