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.”

Posted on January 18, 2012

From October 10 through 16, The New School presents MobilityShifts International Future of Learning Summit (mobilityshifts.org), a university-wide discussion on the de-institutionalization of learning. In collaboration with MobilityShifts, the Vera List Center hosts a conversation between artist Luis Camnitzer and curator Christiane Paul  on the transfer of knowledge from the academy to the street; collective research in pedagogy and artistic practices; how the notion of “assignments” must be redefined to meet the needs of a mobile population; and how to expand learning beyond bounds of school and universities.

Their conversation finds its material counterpart in Camnitzer’s exhibition The Assignment Book, organized by Paul and Scholz, presented from September 21 through October 16 at the Aronson Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design.

The Assignment Book consists of many unresolved conundrums and questions concerning the current status of institutional education. The exhibition intends to stimulate critical multidisciplinary thinking on the questions raised while prompting visitors to leave responses that serve as new stimuli for dialogue. Taking cues from the blog format, the exhibition challenges the traditional role of the artist/teacher by offering a platform for the artist, curators, and visitors to enter into conversation as equal partners, and learn from each other.

Posted on September 28, 2011

On occasion of the exhibition And Another Thing at The James Gallery at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, the Vera List Center and the James Gallery presents a panel discussion featuring artists, scholars and writers on the subject of “thingness.”

What are the political and ethical implications of considering all objects—whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, even whether animate or inanimate– equivalent and thereby interchangeable? Moderated by the exhibition’s co-curator Katherine Behar, sociologist Noortje Marres, media scholar Shannon Mattern and urban designer David Turnbull discuss how this kind of perspective changes the conversation around sustainability as well as human interaction. What happens when technology reaches the scale of cities? Can an object bear responsibility that has previously been reserved for humans? Beginning with the artist’s sometimes contentious relationship to material presence as a platform for the examination of these questions, this panel considers the constellation of disciplines including architecture, ecology, global geography, urban studies, and anthropology that are tackling these questions.

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

Posted on September 26, 2011

This fall, the 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.

Kicking off the series, artist Michael Sailstorfer explores the topic in relation to past works as well as his new large-scale sculpture Tornado. Opening on September 20, Tornado physically transforms some 200 truck inner tube tires into dark “clouds” that swirl above visitors passing through Doris C. Freedman Plaza. The sculpture also mines themes that permeate Sailstorfer’s practice, primarily the use of found materials to create “transformation machines” that expand the space and presence of an object beyond what meets the eye.

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Through the artistic transformation of everyday objects and situations, Michael Sailstorfer creates artworks dealing with the states of euphoria to disintegration. Absurdity and comedy play as important a part in his work as does the question of the space a sculpture can occupy. He works with an enormous range of different functional objects and materials — from lampposts to helicopters, cars and caravans, to the forest floor — transforming them into engrossingly disparate sculptures characterized by charm and wit.

Born in 1979 in Velden/Vils, Germany, Sailstorfer lives and works in Berlin. He received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London, and has studied in residencies in Oslo and Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in Berlin, Oxford, Sao Paulo, Paris, Milan and Rochester, New York, among other cities.

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

Posted on August 9, 2011

Kicking off the spring 2011 Public Art Fund Talks series New York Stories, noted curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp discuss their exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present, which was on view at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid from June through September 2010. The exhibition surveyed the uses artists have made of New York City’s run-down lofts, abandoned piers, vacant lots, and deserted streets during its period of intensive de-industrialization in the 1970s and continuing to the present. As a centerpiece of their show, Cooke and Crimp reassembled Projects: Pier 18, conceived by Willoughby Sharp in 1971 and comprising twenty-seven artists’ projects made on a dilapidated Hudson River pier; the projects were photographed by Shunk-Kender and initially shown at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to Projects: Pier 18, Mixed Use, Manhattan featured more than 250 works by forty artists, including Danny Lyon, Joan Jonas, Peter Hujar, Thomas Struth, Zoe Leonard, David Wojnarowicz, Barbara Probst, Steve McQueen, and Emily Roysdon.

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Lynne Cooke is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. She was co-curator of the 1991 Carnegie International, Artistic Director of the 1996 Sydney Biennale, and the curator at large for Dia Art Foundation from 1991 to 2009. Among her numerous publications are recent essays on the works of Francis Alÿs, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, Josiah McElheny, Zoe Leonard, Juan Muñoz and Thomas Schütte.

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester and the author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002) and On the Museum’s Ruins (MIT Press, 1993). Crimp curated the 1977 Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, New York, and an editor of October magazine from 1977 to 1990, where he edited the 1987 special issue AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. He is currently completing a book about Andy Warhol’s films and working on a memoir of New York in the 1970s.

Posted on January 20, 2011

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.”

Posted on October 26, 2010

Vogue’ology contains seemingly incompatible elements: aesthetic experience and political activism; community events and forensic research; public manifestations and private workshops. The exhibition is a joint project between the Ballroom Archive & Oral History Project and the sound art collective Ultra-red. Central to the collaboration is a shared interest in developing terms that can serve to organize the Ballroom Archive, a community-initiated effort to gather histories of the House|Ballroom scene.

The House|Ballroom scene emerged in New York City in the first half of the last century and is today found in cities across the United States. Members of the scene have organized themselves into houses, such as the House of Ebony, the House of Evisu, and the House of Garçon, which function as intentional communities and artistic collectives. Houses sponsor Balls: large events at which members compete in multiple performance categories. For generations of transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay primarily Latino and African American men and women, the Balls have provoked radical explorations of style, identity and social inequality. Vogue, the community’s signature performance form originally inspired by poses in Vogue magazine, enacts an analysis of normative gender, class and racial identities.

Rather than exhibiting the archive or attempting to represent the House|Ballroom scene itself, Vogue’ology investigates the processes and goals of archiving as they pertain to the specific characteristics and conditions of the House|Ballroom scene. Its structure and aesthetic elements amplify the resonances between the vocabularies of both archive and Balls, particularly their common interest in protocol, category, disassembly, and recombination.

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

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The exhibition is accompanied by a series of free public programs:

EXHIBITION OPENING CELEBRATION
Thursday, November 18, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m

PANEL DISCUSSION
Organized Listening: Sound Art, Collectivity and Politics
Thursday, November 18, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Participants include Edgar Riviera Colon and Rev. Jamaul Roots from Ballroom Ministries; human rights advocate and musician Karen Hakobian; artist Paige Sarlin of 16 Beaver; musician, writer and curator Alex Waterman of Plus Minus Ensemble and Either/Or Ensemble.

Facilitators: Dont Rhine and Robert Sember

LISTENING SESSIONS
Monday, November 29, 2010, 6:00 – 8:30 p.m.

Gallery visitors are encouraged to interact with the exhibition and share their responses in writing, at the gallery or via email (info@ultra-red.org). In addition, the artists are facilitating a public listening session in the gallery, to consider collectively the intersection of object and analysis, and to evaluate and debate the political consequences and possibilities of recording history.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Living the Fight: AIDS Activism
Tuesday, November 30, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
The New School, Michael Klein Room
66 West 12th Street, 5th floor

With Lolisa Gibson, Johnny Guaylupo, Charles Long, and Pedro Julio Serrano

Sponsored by Health Education, Global Studies, Department of Natural Sciences and Math/ Interdisciplinary Science at Lang, Campus Queer Collective, Parsons Diversity Initiative, Lang’s Ethnicity and Race Program, Office of Intercultural Support, VDay@New School, The New You, Association for International Development, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

FILM SCREENING
Sex In An Epidemic
Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Screening of Jean Carlomusto’s award-winning film Sex In An Epidemic (2010), followed by a conversation with Arbert Santana Evisu, Kevin Trimell Jones, Black LGBT Archivists Society of Philadelphia, and Robert Sember

Posted on June 8, 2010

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA). The company performs an excerpt from their new play, THE GOLDEN VEIL, followed by a discussion about their practice.

Written by company member Normandy Sherwood and created collaboratively by the ensemble, THE GOLDEN VEIL is what NTUSA refers to as “cautionary entertainment.” A distillation of the company’s design aesthetic and their re-writing of the history of American entertainment, it is a three-person play performed on an entirely hand-crafted, collapsible set. The play explores the picaresque narrative in the tradition of Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. At the same time, it illuminates how teller and circumstances of telling shape the stories and myths we share as Americans.

Recently awarded the 2007 Spalding Gray Award honoring innovative theatrical vision, NTUSA is an ensemble theater company that democratically creates new works for traditional and non-traditional spaces. In the past seven years, their focus on theatrical environment has been matched by a devotion to the exploration of American history and the history of American entertainment. NTUSA’s theatrical creations are intensely visual and densely layered spectacles which are laced with the questions and arguments they bring to the exploration of each subject. This multiplicity of image and argument invites a complicit audience to engage with each piece as an active participant.

Posted on March 22, 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

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Aleksandra Wagner. Grounded in her memory of a purchase of A Thousand and One Nights in the Serbian translation by Stanislav Vinaver, Wagner chooses the shortest month of a year, February, to tell stories about the acts of storytelling in education and in psychoanalysis. One story a night, one page each, shared on the night of March 3.

Aleksandra Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Bachelor’s Program, The New School for General Studies, and a Member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Wagner is the editor of our recent publication Considering Forgiveness.

Posted on January 27, 2010

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Pablo Helguera. Providing an “unauthorized biography” of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Helguera digs out little-known stories around the remarkable curators and other colorful figures of its past, while at the same time reflecting on the social role of individuals in museums and the way in which they influence the reading of objects and the larger narratives of collections.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. His work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction.

Posted on January 27, 2010

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, the Vera List Center is pleased to announce a colloquium exploring artists’ participation in–and reconstruction of–documentary processes to illuminate new perspectives on historical events. The colloquium, organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), will be held Saturday, January 30 and includes artists Steve Mumford and Liisa Roberts as well as curators Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell with moderator Kate Fowle, Executive Director of ICI.

Please note: this event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited. Please RSVP to Chelsea Haines, Public Programs Manager at 212-254-8200.

The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics will also present a number of public programs, including discussions with Pablo Helguera and Aleksandra Wagner on the role of storytelling in their practice, and a series of screenings of featured works. The events are sponsored by the Vera List Center and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design in collaboration with ICI, the organizer of the exhibition.

Posted on December 10, 2009

In this re-visitation of John Cage’s 1961 sound work WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING?, sounds of The New School, sampled from recordings collected across campus, are re-configured through processes involving various methods of chance and randomization. Cage was first asked to respond to the questions in the title when he addressed art students at the evening school of Pratt Institute. He has also described the resulting piece as emerging from conversations with friends about the mutually influential relationship between art, science and nature.

Echoing the structural elements of Cage’s original piece, this response to the questions “where are we going and what are we doing? ” draws on site recordings made during sound walks through The New School. These recordings are superimposed on each other using chance procedures and amplified as a two-channel composition onto the street around The New School’s main building.  The live ambient sounds function as the performer does in Cage’s work. While drawing attention to ongoing shifts in time they also encourage attention to and reflection on the conditions that produce those shifts–conditions that may themselves, be shifted.

When no events are taking place in the gallery and Parts & Labor lies inactive and mute, these recordings will emanate  from the vicinity of the truck, evocative of the institution and the activities around it.

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

On September 15, in conjunction with the North American debut of the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Mobile Archive, Art in General and the Vera List Center co-hosted a conversation between Galit Eilat, founder of the archive and director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, and Ramallah-based curator and art historian Reem Fadda.

In the context of a discussion of issues ranging from art and civil disobedience to the politics of popular contemporary exhibition formats like the archive or the tour, Eilat and Fadda discussed Liminal Spaces, a long-term project examining the possibility of joint action in light of the ever-growing existential hardship of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Video works that were produced during this project will be on view at Art in General from September 24 to October 17, 2009, as part of the Mobile Archive, a cross-national library of video art. For more information:

Posted on September 20, 2009