Beyond the Super Square: On the Corner of Art & Architecture is a three-day conference designed to draw attention to an important historical period of modernist architectural production in Latin America and the Caribbean that, 40 years later, continues to resonate among many contemporary artists. Opening on October 28, the conference contextualizes the impact of modernist architecture throughout these regions through a series of panels and presentations by scholars, urban planners, students, and contemporary artists, and strives to enrich the dialogue on Latin American architectural tradition, a topic rarely discussed in the United States.

In lieu of a traditional opening night lecture, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, and artist Pedro Reyes inaugurates the conference with the first ever Architecture Challenge! Our charming hosts put the conference participants to test and grill them on the most obscure architectural facts. This evening of game and celebration is conceived by Reyes, organized by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Introduction:
Holly Block, Executive Director, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City

Hosts:
Eva Franch i Gilabert, Director, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City
Terence Gower, artist, New York City
Pedro Reyes, artist, Mexico City

Contestants:
Carlos Brillembourg, Principal, Carlos Brillembourg Architects, New York City
José Castillo, Principal, arq911sc, Mexico City
Felipe Correa, Co-founder, Somatic Collaborative, New York City
Ana Maria Duran, Co-principal, Estudio A0, Quito
Belmont “Monty” Freeman, Principal, Belmont Freeman Architects, New York City
Alejandro Hernández Gálvez, architect, Mexico City
Javier de Jesús Martínez, Associate Dean, Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ponce
Ligia Nobre, independent curator, Sao Paulo
Jorge Pardo, artist, Los Angeles

Posted on September 26, 2011

How do objects sometimes act as vibrant things, with an effectivity of their own, a degree of independence from the words, images, and feelings they provoke in humans? Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of the material world. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center will focus on the material conditions of our lives and examine “thingness,” the nature of matter.

Renowned for her work on nature and ethics, Bennett investigates the power of things, which sometimes manifests as the strange allure that even useless, ugly, or meaningless items can have for us. Her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010) asks how our political world would approach public problems were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things, but the capacity of things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects to manifest traces of independence and vitality?  Following the tangled threads linking vibrant materialities, human selves, and the agentic assemblages they form, Bennett examines what hoarders – people preternaturally attuned to things – might have to teach us about the workings of agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff.

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Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches political theory and American political thought. She is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman’s materialism.

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

Posted on August 10, 2011

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.

Posted on January 26, 2011

Comprehensive and sly, “Change Encounters” is a new project by Lin + Lam, developed over the course of the duo’s 2009-10 Vera List Center at the New School Fellowship and now making its debut.

Conceived in response to the Vera List Center’s focus theme “Speculating on Change,” Lin + Lam have collected an interdisciplinary array of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, and academic scholarship, including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds, and arranged this archive into an interactive website. “Change Encounters” offers multiple vantage points on the nature and the process of change and speculation and is accessed through a random number generator based on the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, one of the oldest books in the world and a predictive device that is still commonly used today.

The project takes its name from the title of René Clair’s 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, a comedy in which a journalist longs for the ability to know the future in advance in order to get a jump on breaking news. This desire for precognition determines human behavior across many fields of experience. Many a head of state – emperors, presidents and dictators, including Napoleon, Hitler and Reagan – has turned to oracles to authorize and consolidate their power. The capacity to aspire to a different future is, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, critical to the possibility for the underprivileged to overcome dire conditions. Can the capacity to aspire be learned and shared? What enables future thinking that is not a product of denial, defense or mere fantasy, but is constructive to change? For contemporary forecasting on our current recession and repressions, professionals from divergent fields join Lin + Lam and present their perspectives on how the future is speculated and formed.

Program

2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Introduction by Carin Kuoni, director, Vera List Center World Premiere of “Change Encounters” by Lin + Lam

3:00 to 4:00 p.m. Panel Discussion

Patricia Ticineto Clough Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York

Mitch Horowitz Editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

Orit Halpern Assistant Professor of Department of History at The New School for Social Research

H. Darrel Rutkin Independent scholar, historian of science with an emphasis on the history of medieval, Renaissance and early modern astrology 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Celebratory Slideshow: Interactive demonstration of speculative devices and reception

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

Posted on August 30, 2010

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The Vera List Center launches its fall 2010 season with a new lecture series, co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons. Focused on “Art and Science,” the 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.

Tatiana Lyubetskaya, the first lecturer, introduces the major concepts that form the basis of scientific thinking such as data, model, assumption and proof before examining specific cases of interdisciplinary scientific investigations in the fields of geology, geochemistry and geophysics illuminate. The common ground between these subjects is found in the principles of mathematical analysis, which allow processing and manipulating different kinds of information in order to construct theoretical models describing the behavior of complex systems. The fundamental problem of determining the chemical composition of the Earth and its applications in different Earth sciences serves as an example. Theoretical modeling of geological processes such as mountain building and erosion will be examined as it illuminates the ways in which a scientific problem is formulated and how possible solutions are constructed and tested.

Lyubetskaya whose own background includes the sciences as well as the visual arts – she received her PhD in geophysics from Yale and is a MFA graduate at Parsons – launches this new lectures series. The second speaker, on September 7, is mathematician Jennifer Wilson.

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Tatiana Lyubetskaya graduated from Moscow State University in 2000. In 2000-2003, Lyubetskaya worked as a researcher at the Oceanology Institute in Moscow and participated in the BEAR EUROPEPROBE project. She received her PhD in geophysics from Yale University in 2010. Lyubetskaya was awarded the William Ebenezer Ford prize for research in mineralogy in 2008 and the Elias Loomis Prize for Excellence in Studies of Physics of the Earth in 2009; her papers are published in the American Journal of Science, the Journal of Geophysical Research and the Journal of Petrology.

Posted on August 24, 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 celebration of the release of the second issue of Where We Are Now’s online journal, edited by Joseph Grima, Marisa Jahn and Vera List Center director Carin Kuoni, contributors gather to discuss their explorations of this issue’s guiding theme: Speculating on Change.

Explicitly tied to difference, change as such is perhaps most clearly measured in terms of chronological time, comparing a “before” to an established “after.” Speculation on change, however, entails projection, prognosis and risk into the future, and corresponds to the fluid, divergent and simultaneous time space continuum of our contemporary existence.

The launch will feature a presentation by journal contributor Melanie Crean. “The Shape of Change,” her ongoing web project featured in the second issue, investigates how people perceive, measure and represent change over time, in both personal and political contexts, through two distinct approaches. The first component of the project is a public web archive that tracks American and Iraqi citizens’ desire for political change as the two countries attempt to extricate from one another politically and militarily. The second component documents an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, and thus establish itself as an independent social subject. The two approaches serve as counterpoint to one another, creating a portrait of the ephemeral nature of change, independence and identity formation, from a macro and micro perspective.

Other journal contributors include Tom Angotti, Daniel Bozhkov, Celine Condorelli, Bryan Finoki, Beatrice Gibson, Jean Gourley, Carlos Motta, Andrew Ross, Ben Shepard, Mark Tribe and Merve Unsal.

Where We Are Now was founded in November 2007 by an ad hoc group of representatives of many arts organizations in the city, among them The Change You Want to See Gallery, Creative Time, Cooper Union, Parsons the New School of Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. It is a discursive and loosely organized platform with the mission to illuminate, deepen and amplify the discourse around an aesthetic practice with political content in New York City.

More information on Where We Are Now.

This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle, “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on September 20, 2009