Using various non-traditional materials—from jet engines to bovine parts to chemical nitrates and salt—Roger Hiorns’ sculptures, performances, and installations broadly investigate the possibility of transformation in objects, social encounters, and urban situations. Hiorns is well-known for his 2009 ArtAngel commission, Seizure, in which the artist pumped 75,000 liters of copper sulfate solution into an abandoned South London council flat to create a crystalline growth on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Transformation, by way of such chemical and organic processes, is central to much of his work and is often connected to considerations of meaning and rhetoric. For his talk, Hiorns considers this subject in relation to new works.

* * *

Born in 1975 in Birmingham, England, Roger Hiorns lives and works in London. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; The Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Britain; Camden Arts Centre, London; and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2009, Hiorns was nominated for the Turner Prize for his installation Seizure.

Public Art Fund Talks at The New School are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

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

Posted on January 26, 2012

How can we harness collaborative culture, critical analysis, participatory technologies and aesthetics to incite social change?  What content and platforms can we create that will respond to the limits and possibilities of the ever-shifting contemporary media landscape?

Paper Tiger Television puts theory into practice — participants of the conference are challenged to collaboratively design prototypes for a new rrradical media, building on the ideals of non-hierarchical-participatory culture, critical analysis, activism and innovative aesthetics. A broad cross section of individuals, working together with varied proclivities, interests and abilities, opens up the potential for something truly revolutionary to develop.

Media Intensive: 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Succinct, fast-paced and provocative presentations on key topics of the design challenge: Justice & Autonomy, New Activism & Movement Building, Collectivism & Collaborative Culture, Materiality & Aesthetics

Lunch: 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Presenters and grassroots media advocates host informal discussions dedicated to conference themes.

Design Challenge: 1:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Groups of 8-10 participants will be challenged to collectively create prototypes for a new form of rrradical media.

Team Presentations: 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Each group gives 10 minutes to present their rrradical media prototype. Selected prototypes will be featured in Documentary Fortnight 2012: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media on February 24.

Media Studies Speakers
Jesse Drew, professor, Techno-cultural Studies, University of California, Davis
Pablillo Jose, hacktivist
Shannon Mattern, assistant professor, School of Media Studies, The New School
Martha Wallner, Media & Communications Coordinator, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
Isaac Wilder, Executive Director, Free Network Foundation

Design Challenge Facilitators
Robby Herbst, artist
Tracy Luz, documentary filmmaker
Deep Dish TV, media laboratory since 1986

Democracy Now!, national, daily, independent, and award winning global news program
Housing Is A Human Right, documentary project
Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access network
Media Action Grassroots Network, local-to-local advocacy network of grassroots community organizations
People’s Production House, journalism training and production institute

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

* Presented by Paper Tiger Television, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement , on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on January 23, 2012

Vera List Center for Art and Politics and SculptureCenter present Subjective Histories of Sculpture. This program, initiated in 2006, explores how contemporary artists think about sculpture; its history and its legacies. This year, Lucy Skaer, Nairy Baghramian, and Josephine Meckseper present their own take on art history. Citing specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside art, these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories question assumptions and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture’s evolving strategies.

Lucy Skaer’s installations subject the conventional classification of objects and historical references to scrutiny, shifting meaning toward the symbolic and absurd. Often working with pre-existing imagery and found forms, Skaer’s sculptures, films, and works on paper emphasize repetition and variation even as they retain a gestural immediacy. Her surrogate adaptations of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures, for example, use familiar forms as a decoy for exploring faltering modes of industrial production and distribution, resulting in the collapse of image and object into a shared psychological space a characteristic of much of her work. Skaer’s work re-animates the power of the symbolic that lies beyond obsolescence, as in a recent 35mm film that imagines the memory of a film projector from an abandoned cinema in Leeds, England.

* * *

Lucy Skaer was born in Cambridge, England, in 1975, and currently lives in New York. Skaer works primarily in sculpture, painting, film, and installation. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and has had solo exhibitions at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and Chisenhale Gallery, London, among other venues. She has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including the 52nd Venice Biennale, the 5th Berlin Biennale, and recent group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, and K21 Düsseldorf, Germany. Skaer was a Turner Prize finalist in 2009.

Posted on January 20, 2012

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.

*  *  *

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

“Grave diggers” have, since the middle of the 1980s, been unearthing bones and turning burial sites into an epistemic resource from which the details of war crimes can be reconstructed and brought into the pale of the law. Forensic teams, including archaeologists, anthropologists, pathologists, radiologists, dental experts, bio-data technicians, DNA specialists and statisticians of all sorts, are working in international teams organized by NGOs or sponsored by the United Nations or international tribunals. Their practices mark a shift in emphasis from the living to the dead, from memory and trauma to empirical science, and from subjects to objects in accounting for atrocities.

Introduction:
Thomas Keenan, Bard College
Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths, University of London

Presentations:
Eric Stover, writer and faculty director, The Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley
Grupa Spomenik / Monument Group: Damir Arsenijevic, Branimir Stojanovic, and Milica Tomić, Belgrade, Serbia

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY TWO 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.”

Posted on October 19, 2011

This fall, the Public Art Fund Talks at The New School series examines 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 conceptual art on contemporary sculptural practice, this series examines how the limits of an object might be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.

The second speaker of the series is Alaska-based, Italian artist Paola Pivi. Her installations, sculpture, performances, and photographs create astonishing and enigmatic associations and visual relationships that expand our understanding of the experience of contemporary art. Bringing together surprising references from our everyday world, Pivi has orchestrated such unexpected scenarios as a gallery petting zoo, a transport truck flipped on the side of a road, 100 Chinese people gathered in a gallery, and a leopard traversing a gallery filled with cups of cappuccino. Likened to an “experiential playground”, her work ultimately subverts expectation with the unanticipated. Pivi’s artistic practice challenges our mode of engagement by presenting the inconceivable as real.

*  *  *

Born in Milan, Paola Pivi has exhibited widely across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the United States. She was the recipient of the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennial. Her work has been presented at Manifesta, and the Berlin Biennial. Pivi has also exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MACRO, Rome; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Portikus, Frankfurt; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Tate Modern, London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Massachusset College of Art, Boston; Brown University, Providence; Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; P.S.1 MoMA, and White Columns, New York. She is represented by Massimo De Carlo, Milan and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris.

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

Posted on September 28, 2011

New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has been called “America’s most important living art critic,” and “the unacknowledged dean of a bastard profession.” But is it? Schjeldahl takes on the challenge in a lecture/speech/manifesto he spent the summer burnishing for prime time at The New School for the 2011 International Art Critics Association/USA Distinguished Lecture. Like Wilde, he champions beauty in an era when it has been debased. He privileges personal confession over theory as the portal to comprehending art. “Paintings are vacations from myself,” according to the aggressively shy critic who started writing about art to support his poetry-writing habit. Schjeldahl has stipulated that the Q&A following his presentation be “open season,” in which the tables are turned and he readies himself for “questions, comments, and attacks.”

* * *

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He came to The New Yorker from The Village Voice, where he was the art critic from 1980 to 1998. Previously, he had written for The New York Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section. His writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Schjeldahl has received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association, for excellence in art criticism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of four books, including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings, which was published in 1991.

This is the fifth AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism. It is presented by the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Associations Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

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.

*  *  *

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

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.

*  *  *

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

2001 Vera List Center Fellow Margarita Gutman speaks with leading urban scholars William Morrish and Saskia Sassen about her new book Buenos Aires: Itinerant Images of a Metropolitan Future in the First Centennial. This is the first book that comprehensively examines the imagination of the urban future in Buenos Aires. The volume contains close to two hundred images selected from over seven thousand publications which circulated in Buenos Aires between 1900 and 1920. The diversity, creativity, and humor of the images express what the citizens of Buenos Aires expected from a promising urban future. Moderated by David Scobey.

The event is co-sponsored by The New School for General Studies, Bachelor Program.

Buenos Aires: El Poder de la Anticipacion. Imagenes Itinerantes del Futuro Metropolitano en el primer Centenario.
(Buenos Aires: The Power of Anticipation. Itinerant Images of a Metropolitan Future in the First Centennial).
Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 2011.

Presenter:
Margarita Gutman, Associate Professor, Urban Studies and International Affairs, The New School for General Studies

Posted on March 30, 2011

From South Africa, via London, comes Warhorse, the hugely successful theater and puppetry collaboration between Cape Town’s Handspring Puppet Company and the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain. Warhorse is based on the celebrated novel by British writer Michael Morpurgo. Set in World War I, the novel speaks of the immense slaughter of soldiers on all sides told from the perspective of an English farm horse. It will open at Lincoln Center on April 14, 2011.

On the eve of the opening, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, founders of Handspring Puppet Company and winners of Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for this piece, converse with South African-born poet, author and scholar Yvette Christiansë and puppeteer Dan Hurlin. They focus on puppetry as a contemporary medium of communication and advocacy, and look at The Object as Verb, Movement as Thought and The Authorial Audience.

Come hear writer, curator and scholar Jane Taylor speak on Tuesday April 12, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at Cabinet. Taylor has worked with Handspring in developing two major works: the script for Ubu and the Truth Commission and the libretto for The Confessions of Zeno.

The extraordinary success of Warhorse has drawn attention to Handspring’s decades-long experiments and innovations in the art of puppetry and their remarkable contribution to theater in South Africa. Founded in 1981 by Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler, Jill Joubert and Jon Weinberg, the company has produced eleven plays and two operas, often directly addressing pressing political concerns such as the proceedings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They have collaborated with many artists including Mali’s Sogolon Puppet Troupe and South African artist William Kentridge, and have appeared in over two hundred venues in South Africa and abroad.

The event is co-sponsored by the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design.

Posted on December 10, 2010

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.

* * *

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

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.

Posted on November 22, 2010

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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.

*    *    *

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.

Posted on November 3, 2010

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this 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. Okwui Enwezor’s lecture is entitled “On the Politics of Disaggregation: Notes on Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits.”

Far more than for any other part of his oeuvre, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles has become known for his project Insertions into Ideological Circuits from the early 1970s. In order to avoid censorship, Meireles printed images and messages onto various consumer items (such as recyclable Coca-Cola bottles) and bank notes already in wide circulation. Enwezor analyzes this body of work, maintaining that Meireles’ Insertions – like Jorge Luis Borges’ forking paths – operate at the gap between material flows, ideological structures, and nodes of value (symbolic, social, economic, political). The artist’s “insertions” are as much cuts inscribed on as they are breaks struck into formal structures of power, broadcast systems, and instruments of public transmission.

As Enwezor elaborates, “In tactical terms, the “insertions” represent the brutal scoring onto the sheets of public consciousness of the wild rumors of human existence caught in the grips of unaccountable power. Thus they are procedures of disaggregation carefully insinuated into spheres of everyday practice whether embodied in models of institutional totalization – for instance in the machineries of the State and multinational capital – or in the theological pieties of the church and family. In seeking to analyze and attack these scenes of production, communication, dissemination, and domination, Meireles in Inserções formulated the modalities of a counter-ideological discourse, one which through communicative action arrives at the address of its intended public by means of dispersal and detour into social structures and institutional systems.”

Enwezor’s talk follows two lectures on post-Fordism and artistic practices, delivered by sociologist Pascal Gielen and philosopher Michael Hardt on October 26.

*   *   *

Okwui Enwezor is a curator, writer, and scholar. He is the founding publisher and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Since 2005 he is Adjunct Curator at International Center of Photography, New York and was previously Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Enwezor was Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute (2005-2009) and has held academic appointments as Visiting Professor in Art History at University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, New York, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Umea, Sweden. In 2011 he will deliver the Alain Leroy Locke Lectures at Harvard University, and in 2012, he will serve as Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Enwezor has served as the Artistic Director of several leading biennials and global exhibitions including the 2^nd Johannesburg Biennale (1996-1997); Documenta 11 (1998-2002); 2^nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain (2005-2006); and 7^th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2007-2008). He is currently Artistic Director of Meeting Points 6, a performance and visual arts project bringing together theater, dance, film, and contemporary art in eight Arab and European cities (Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, Tangier, Brussels, Berlin). Amongst Enwezor’s numerous exhibitions are The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, Museum Villa Stuck; Century City, Tate Modern, London; Mirror’s Edge, Bildmuseet, Umea; In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940-Present, Guggenheim Museum; Global Conceptualism, Queens Museum, New York and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Stan Douglas: Le Detroit, Art Institute of Chicago; David Goldblatt: Fifty One Years, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Center of Photography, New York; The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, Centro Andalucia de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, and Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, at International Center of Photography, New York. Some of his publications include Events of the Self: Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection (Steidl, 2010); Contemporary African Art Since 1980, with Chika Okeke-Agulu (Damiani Editore, 2009; Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (ICP/Steidl, 2008); Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Fink Verlag, 2002); as well as edited volumes Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity with Terry Smith and Nancy Condee (Duke University Press, 2008), and Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (INIVA and MIT Press, 1999). He is currently completing work on two historical exhibitions: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Bureaucracy, Institutions and Everyday Life; and Sun in their Eyes: Photography and the Invention of Africa, 1839-1939, as part of trilogy of exhibitions focusing on the African continent at the International Center of Photography, New York.

Posted on October 26, 2010

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.

Posted on October 21, 2010

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.

Posted on October 20, 2010

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. 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.

In a double lecture and discussion Pascal Gielen and Michael Hardt discuss the role and the functioning of the art world from a philosophical and a sociological perspective. Gielen describes the art scene as a perfect production unit for economic exploitation in the contemporary network society as he searches for possibilities for artistic freedom in our Post-Fordist work contexts. Michael Hardt responds and argues that the Post-Fordist context offers the possibility of art as biopolitical production. He is asking the question whether artistic skills and talents can be deployed in a democratic project of the defense, production and distribution of the common. This event is paired with a lecture by curator Okwui Enwezor, presented on November 2, 2010.

*   *   *

Pascal Gielen is Professor of Sociology of the Arts at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. The director of the research group and book series Arts in Society, Gielen has written and co-authored several books on contemporary art, cultural heritage and cultural politics. In 2009, he edited the book Being An Artist in Post-Fordist Times (with Paul De Bruyne) and published The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude. Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Valiz). In 2010, Community Art and Beyond. The Political Potency of Trespassing was published (Valiz), also edited by De Bruyne and Gielen.

Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. With Antonio Negri he co-authored Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and CommonWealth (2009).

Posted on October 11, 2010

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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. 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.

Kim Knowlton discusses how climate change impacts public health and how energy production alters landscapes and lives. She explores the story of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to shed light on the far-ranging impacts of energy choices we make today on near-term and future environmental and health consequences.

This lecture is paired with a talk by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle on October 12, 2010, who will talk of his recent works on natural and constructed phenomena, including climate change.

*   *   *

Kim Knowlton, PhD, is senior scientist with the Health and Environment Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she leads the Global Warming and Health Project. She is also Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and chair of the Global Climate Change and Health Committee of the Environment Section at the American Public Health Association. She was among the scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. She works at NRDC on communicating the health impacts of global warming, and on advocating for public health strategies to prepare for and prevent these impacts. Her published research has looked at heat- and ozone-related mortality and illnesses, as well as climate change’s effects on pollen, allergies and asthma, and infectious illnesses. She attended Cornell University and Hunter College/CUNY, and received a doctorate in public health from Columbia University. She was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia, and a Mellon Foundation Teaching Fellow in Barnard College’s Department of Environmental Sciences before joining NRDC.

Posted on September 29, 2010

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. 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.

In this conversation, artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle presents some of his recent works on natural and constructed phenomena, including climate change. In so doing, he raises the question of truth – political truth, scientific truth, and artistic truthfulness. How is an artist, a scientist, a politician to represent a situation truthfully, and what tools are available to him or her? Rather than focus on the visualization of empirical data – the most direct translation of fact into an aesthetic product – Manglano-Ovalle considers language as the shared medium between the three and asks who determines how the world gets represented.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s lecture follows a talk by Kim Knowlton from NRDC, presented on October 5, 2010.

*   *   *

Often working in partnership or employing technical experts across multiple disciplines including engineering, architecture, genomics, and climatology, Manglano-Ovalle produces objects that are often technically complex, formally captivating, and conceptually engaging. Manglano-Ovalle lives and works in Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at Mass MoCA (2009-10); The Art Institute of Chicago (2010); Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld, Germany (2005); and Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2003); among others. His work has also been included in group shows at the Musèe D’Art Contemporain Nimes (2009); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2008); Documenta XII (2007); and the Whitney Biennial (2000). He has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2001).

Posted on September 20, 2010

Looking at other animals is, for most humans, a fun thing to do. That is, unless it’s depressing. Contemporary zoos go to surprising lengths in order to satiate our desires to see animals that look happy–from spraying Calvin Klein cologne in tiger enclosures (to inspire them to be more active) to giving female gorillas human contraceptives so that they can have the joy of sex without the complication of too many babies. But how do we know if a zoo animal is happy or not? And once we’ve figured it out, what on earth do we do about it? In this talk, Laurel Braitman explores human understandings of animal happiness and discontent in the context of zoos and aquariums and just what these ideas say about us.

Laurel Braitman’s lecture is paired with a talk by artist Nina Katchadourian, also focusing on human/animal relationships.

*   *   *

Laurel Braitman, historian and anthropologist of science at MIT, studies the phenomena of mental illness in nonhuman animals. Braitman has worked as a biologist and environmental conservation professional and her interests include not only the shifting relationships between humans and other creatures, but also how understandings of evolutionary relationships and species distinctions change our ideas of ourselves. She received her B.A. in Biology and Writing from Cornell University and is completing her doctorate in MIT’s History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society Program. Braitman’s book on her research, Animal Madness, is forthcoming with Simon and Schuster.

Posted on September 7, 2010

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. 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.

Nina Katchadourian’s work has often looked at the relationship between the human and natural worlds, questioning our assumptions about those two terms and where we draw the line between them. Older works (such as Mended Spiderwebs, Natural Car Alarms, and Animal Crossdressing) will be discussed by way of providing background to the artist’s most recent animal-oriented piece, a complex multi-channel video and sound environment entitled Zoo. Shot in zoos all around the world between 2001 and 2008 (and ongoing), Zoo tries to ask what it is that we desire from and what we project onto the animal-human relationship. Both questions come under a particular kind of compression in the zoo environment.

Nina Katchadourian’s lecture follows a talk by anthropologist Laurel Braitman on September 14, also focusing on human-animal relationships.

*   *   *

Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California, and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media including photography, sculpture, video and sound. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, the ICA Philadelphia and the Palais de Tokyo. In 2006, the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland, featured a solo show of works made in Finland and the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installation works in 2008. Katchadourian received her BFA from Brown University in Visual Art and Literature and Society, holds an MFA from UC San Diego, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Posted on August 30, 2010

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. 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.

Mathematics is often described as the science of patterns. This implies that it is primarily concerned with visualizing, analyzing and predicting the phenomena we observe in the physical world and in the relationships we see among numbers. But mathematics also looks at the unpredictable, the unexpected. In this talk, Jennifer Wilson explores what it means to be truly random; how the probability of unlikely events changes depending on how the question is asked; and how stable patterns can become chaotic and then stable again as we change the way we look at them.

Jennifer Wilson’s lecture is paired with a presentation on September 11, 2010, of Change Encounters, a new project on probabilities, predictions and prophecies by Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellows Lin + Lam.

*   *   *

Jennifer Wilson is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Eugene Lang College. She received her B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. Her primary research interests are in mathematics applied to the social sciences, particularly cooperative game theory and voting theory, and has she recently co-authored a series of papers analyzing the Democratic Party Presidential Primary. She is also interested in the role of visualization in mathematics, and is currently working on a collaborative project to examine how illustrations are used to convey financial information.

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.

*   *   *

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

British artist Ryan Gander will launch the fall 2010 Public Art Fund Talks series with one of his celebrated Loose Associations presentations. In the form of a narrated PowerPoint, the artist will string together a series of images, memories, facts, and histories in a hybrid performance-lecture.

These intense and sometimes comedic presentations have taken place across Europe, most recently as part of Art Basel’s new “Art Parcours” project. Gander’s first public art commission entitled The Happy Prince will also be on view at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park this fall, beginning September 15, 2010. This new work, reminiscent of an ancient ruin, depicts the final moments of Oscar Wilde’s beloved children’s story.

Posted on July 20, 2010

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In awarding New York Times art critic Holland Cotter the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the Pulitzer Committee citation noted his “acute observation, luminous writing [and] dramatic story telling.” In his AICA/USA Distinguished Critic talk the writer known for the range and deep humanity of his concerns will address his roundabout route to art criticism, his response to the predominant modes of art criticism, the increasing limitations of that model, and how he imagines it could be changed and expanded.

This is the fourth AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism.  It is presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts.  There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture.  AICA/USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.

Posted on June 8, 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.

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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

“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

CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Posted on February 22, 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

CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change
The inaugural lecture on “Speculating on Change” was delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School on October 16, 2009. Cohen discussed cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change. Four specific “paradoxes” – dealing with issues of economy, geography, politics, and sustainability – provided entries to a discussion of cities as both spaces of hope and sites of vulnerability.

RESPONSE: William Morrish
The response is offered by William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design. Trained as an architect, Morrish comes to Parsons from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he taught and led research in the areas of sustainable urban infrastructure, new housing models, and global urbanization and climate change. In that role, he focused on interdisciplinary work addressing what he calls the “second generation of sustainability”: the design of cultural ecologies. He is a nationally recognized urban designer whose practice encompasses inter-disciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, and educational programs exploring integrated design, which are applied to a wide range of innovative community-based city projects.

Michael Cohen’s lecture focused on the discrepancy between emerging ideas on sustainable urban development and the realities of implementing them on the ground, in the growing global city. The four points of his lecture identify the reasons that capacity cannot be delivered, namely the lack of adequate research, tools and models. His lecture points to the disturbing fact that most of our urban development skills are based on outdated concepts that identify master plans and large projects as the cure for urban ills. Cohen began to sketch the challenge faced when transferring stimuli for change from to the top to a middle zone, where local economic, social and ecological activities can aggregate into more sustainable urban networks of support. The sobering conclusion of his lecture was that we have little time to change practice and behavior. As the polar ice caps melt, cities are being flooded with new social, cultural and environment realities.

Yet within this maelstrom of global urban change, communities such as Bogotá, Columbia, and Rosaria, Argentina, are overhauling the old the rules of planning, governance and management procedures. Civic leaders and neighborhood activists are learning how to turn the principles of sustainable development into new models of integrated design, inclusive operations, and regenerative practices. These transformations focus on the mid-size scale of the cities and combine it with basic everyday economic and social transactions, for instance by expanding mobility options, connecting micro-business networks, and designing open and transparent civic facilities as cultural centers.

Posted on December 2, 2009

The New School hosts Peter M. Rutkoff, Professor of American Studies at Kenyon College, to deliver a lecture commemorating the 90th Anniversary of the founding of The New School. Professor Rutkoff wrote New School: A History of The New School for Social Research, the seminal history of The New School and the only publication to deal with the university’s storied history in depth. The co-author of the only published monograph on the history of The New School, Rutkoff considers the heritage of the university on its 90th anniversary. In light of current debates on the challenges posed by urban schooling, pedagogy, and philosophy he will reexamine the influence of The New School in progressive education. Can the teachings of John Dewey (on the 150th anniversary year of his birthday) continue to serve as a guide to the direction of progressive education? He will draw on examples of school and university alliances and the on-going importance of experiential pedagogy in contemporary education. He will, to cite Zorah Neale Hurston, urge American schools to leave the classroom.

Sponsored by The New School and held in conjunction with the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Posted on October 7, 2009

The AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School In an insightful, probing and personal analysis, Roberta Smith delivers this year’s AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. Under the title “Criticism: A Life Sentence,” Smith presents her view of the craft, process and usage of art criticism, and the rising challenges of crisis-management and relevance-maintenance.

Roberta Smith is the acclaimed senior art critic for the New York Times. She was born in New York City, raised in Lawrence, Kansas, and earned a B.A. from Grinnell College in 1969. An alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Paula Cooper Gallery before becoming a professional art critic in the 1970s, contributing to Artforum and serving as a senior editor for Art in America. In 1981 she became art critic for the Village Voice, before moving to the New York Times in 1986. In 2003, the College Art Association honored Smith with the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism.

This is the third AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism. It is presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts. There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture. AICA/USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.

*The New School Box Office is open Monday through Friday, 1 to 7 p.m. Reservations and inquiries can be made by emailing boxoffice@newschool.edu or calling 212.229.5488

Posted on September 20, 2009

As The New School celebrates its 90th anniversary, this collaboration between Parts & Labor and the Vera List Center features a series of free events hosted in Parts & Labor’s mobile gallery, a truck parked outside Tishman auditorium. Discussions, lectures, and workshops presented inside the truck and in adjacent rooms in The New School’s “signature building” (designed by Joseph Urban in 1930) bring together a cast of contributors, members of the university community, and the public to examine the founding principles of The New School and to address the question of how these principles have fared over time. These participatory events investigate the institutional and pedagogical history of the university as they have grown alongside a community and its urban site. Through a variety of interactive strategies participants initiate reflections on recent calls for change at The New School by projecting them against the backdrop of the university’s unique history of critical engagement with the concepts of newness and change.

Parts & Labor’s stop at The New School is one in a series of encounters unfolding during a traveling exhibition that will subsequently tour the country and explore other site- and community-specific experiences of the transformation of the American landscape. In its New York manifestation, called “By Any Name,” the project takes the concept of a university archive and re-imagines it as a representational installation with the power to evoke–and possibly, to jog–institutional memory, serving as an aesthetic, systemic response to the diverse missions, traditions, and images now associated with The New School.

Composed of recycled texts and computer equipment, materials drawn from The New School library, and a new text penned by members of The New School community, this week-long on-campus environment involves a range of major and lesser-known events, figures, ideas, opinions, and reminiscences which inform the legacy of the university. “By Any Name” invites both The New School community and the general public to consider: How does The New School remember its past, and how can its approach to the past change its approach to the future? “By Any Name” insists that the university’s legacy be subject to further documentation.

These events are presented as part of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program cycle “Speculating on Change.”

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Unless noted below, all events take place in Parts & Labor Gallery at The New School, parked outside of Tishman Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street, and are free and open to the public.

Consultation/Séance
The Future
Monday, October 19 through Friday, October 23, 2009
Open daily, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Featuring psychics Sherene Schostak and Kiki T

Sound Installation
WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING?
Monday, October 19 through Saturday, October 24, 2009, Open daily
A project by Vera List Center Fellows Lin + Lam and Robert Sember

Drawing Workshop
Thomas Bosket
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.

Discussion Group
Ali Krasners on the history of The New School
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 4:00 to 4:50 p.m.

Discussion Group
Tess Harrison on the history of The  New School
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 5:00 to 5:50 p.m.

Lecture
Peter M. Rutkoff
The New School at 90: What Would Dewey Do?
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 6:00 to 8:30 p.m.
Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street
Reception to follow in Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)

Workshop
Andy Bichlbaum’s Class, sans Andy
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 – 3:00 to 5:40 p.m.
Featuring psychic Sherene Schostak

Open Discussion
John Zinsser
The New York Art World and The New School: History and Possibility
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 – 1:00 to 2:45 p.m.
Parsons The New School for Design, Kellen Auditorium
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street

Roundtable
The Librarians’ Circle
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
The New School, Orozco Room
66 West 12th Street, 7th floor

Class Session
Joseph Heathcott: The City as Archive
Thursday, October 22, 2009 – 12:00 to 1:40 p.m.

Conversation and Art Walk
Art in the Institution/Art as the Institution:
The New School Art Collection and its Institutional Life
Thursday, October 22, 2009 – 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Vera List Courtyard, 66 West 12th Street, ground floor

Posted on September 20, 2009

Read the response by William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design. Each year, an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center’s annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that will be explored in public programs throughout the year. The lecturer introduces the theme in the broadest sense, serving as a guide to the range and richness of the topic at hand, and rooting the concept within The New School’s intellectual tradition.

This year’s programs call for a speculation on notions of “change,” specifically some of the descriptions, procedures and perceptions associated with change that inform collective action, whether political, scientific, or cultural. The inaugural lecture is delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School.

• The economic paradox that cities are both the sites of income and opportunity and the sites of growing poverty and inequality,
• The geographic paradox that cities are quintessentially “local” and specific to their geographic context, yet they are the sites of intensified impacts of global processes,
• The political paradox of growing urban populations that will soon represent the majorities of national populations, but do not receive the political attention they deserve and require, and
• The sustainability paradox that cities are sites of pollution that contribute to greenhouse gases, but are also the sites of opportunity for policy reform and sustainable design of the material world.

This program has been made possible, in part, by a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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

Posted on September 20, 2009