Coming on the heels of The New School’s Teach-in on October 22, this event highlights the perspectives of critical theorists, historians, lawyers, and sociologists and presents their predictions for the future of public protests.

Speakers:
Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and Department Chair, The New School for Social Research
Joseph Giacona, student, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts
Gideon Orion Oliver, Executive Committee of the National Lawyer Guild, New York City Chapter
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School for Social Research
Alex Vitale, Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College
Eli Zaretsky, Professor of History, The New School for Social Research

Posted on November 1, 2011

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

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

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