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.

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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.”

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.”

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.

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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.

This fall, Public Art Fund Talks at The New School examine the transformative potential of sculpture and its ability to reach beyond the material presence of an object’s physical form. Inspired by the influence of an earlier conceptual art legacy on contemporary sculptural practice, this series examines how the limits of an object might be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.

History is a part of every single action, every single thing that we do. We don’t choose it; it kind of chooses us… In being who we are, we are constantly sending these signals out to the world, and when you start to get a signal back—that is the thing that’s acknowledging our presence, our vision. And at that moment, that’s the point when you’ve chosen it. We’ve sent the signal out, the signal comes back to us, and at that moment we embody history and as we send these signals out its just showing that we’re aware of doing so.

-Matthew Day Jackson, The Brooklyn Rail, July-August 2011

Matthew Day Jackson explores the relationship between materials, myths, and recent history to create works that grapple with the nature of human experience, both personal and collective.  Jackson’s work utilizes an everyday iconography juxtaposed with an unknown archaeology of form to create “brave new worlds” of encounter in his works, whether he is working in sculpture, collage, video or photography.

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Born in 1974 in Panorama City, California, Matthew Day Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center; Princeton University Art Museum; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Hayward Gallery ; Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Barbican Gallery, London; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; 1st Athens Biennale; 2nd Moscow Biennale; 3rd Beijing Biennale; Herning Kunstmuseum; Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York.

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

“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.”

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.

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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.”

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.”

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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.

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.”

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.”

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