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.”

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Lucy Skaer’s installations subject the conventional classification of objects and historical references to scrutiny, shifting meaning toward the symbolic and absurd.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.

Thingness of Energy is a mixed media art installation by Jamie Kruse, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in the lobby of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, a glass-enclosed gallery opening onto Fifth Avenue. It serves as the physical and virtual hub for long-term discussions as well as temporary interactions, events and happenings on The New School’s energy use and its economic, environmental, ethical, urban and artistic implications.

With unprecedented access to the university’s infrastructure and support staff, Kruse has spent six months investigating the flow of energy through various New School buildings. The outcome of her research is a complex, intricate and fragile assemblage of the physical components of energy. The installation is made up of the material conduits of energy – the pipes, wires, switch boxes and tubes through which it flows – as well as samples of some of the energy sources themselves (fossil fuels and coal) in addition to maps and photographs. Mounted on the building’s membrane, i.e. its windows, the installation is visible from both the street and the building’s interior underscoring the correlation between producer of energy – the outside – to consumer of energy – the people in the building.

Energy materials and flows are often hidden in basements or invisibly channeled through pipes and wires. Thingness of Energy is a provocation to consider and directly experience the material realities of energy. Taking The New School’s Climate Action Plan as its point of departure, the project reveals the deep geologic nature and effects of the materials we use to generate and transmit energy. And it underscores the power of deep time – both past and future – as a generator of energy forms and effects.

At its core, Thingness of Energy poses the question: what if “anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect” became a common design specification for energy production and distribution, policy-making, and infrastructure design?

The presentation is accompanied by several public programs, among them an installation walkthrough and facilities tour on Thursday, February 23, 12:30 p.m. (RSVP required: vlc@newschool.edu) and an energy-driven exchange among New School faculty members from different programs, on Monday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.

The opening reception coincides with other openings at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Where Do We Migrate To?, curated by Niels Van Tomme.

For further information, visit
www.veralistcenter.org/kruse
http://smudgestudio.org/smudge/Thingness.html

For inquiries regarding artist-led tours or public classes, please contact vlc@newschool.edu.

*  *  *

Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer and independent scholar. In 2006 she co-founded (with Elizabeth Ellsworth) smudge studio, based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Recent projects include Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York. Exhibitions have been presented at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Incident Report, Hudson, New York. She has been granted residencies with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT; Sundance Preserve; the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Kruse is the author of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog.

*   *   *

Thingness of Energy is an art project by Jamie Kruse, developed and produced in collaboration with The New School’s Office for Sustainability, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The project is supported, in part, by The New School’s Green Fund and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

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

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.”

While legal and cultural scholars have labeled the third part of the 20th century – with its particular attention to testimony – as the “era of the witness,” the emergence of forensics in legal forums and popular entertainment signifies a new attention to the communicative capacity, agency, and power of things. This material approach is evident in the ubiquitous role that science and technologies now play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating. Today’s legal and political decisions are often based upon the capacity to display and read DNA samples, 3D laser scans, nanotechnology, and the enhanced vision of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance. From mass graves to retinal scans, the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed buildings, forensics is not only about the diagnostics, but also about the rhetoric of persuasion. The aesthetic dimension of forensics includes its means of presentation, the theatrics of its delivery, the forms of image and gesture. The forensic aesthetics of the present carries with it grave political and ethical implications, spreading its impact across socioeconomic, environmental, scientific, and cultural domains.

Etymologically, forensics refers to the “forum,” and to the practice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. Forensics has always been part of rhetoric, but its domain includes not only human speech but also that of objects. In forensic rhetoric, objects can address the forum. Because objects do not speak for themselves, there is a need for “translation” or “interpretation” – forensic rhetoric requires a person or a set of technologies to mediate between the object and the forum, to present the object, interpret it and place it within a larger net of relations.

The lectures and roundtable discussions by the participating artists, scholars and curators investigate these issues in a series of “forums” organized around a number of disputed objects.

Follow the links to detailed event schedules: DAY ONE and DAY TWO.

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.

*  *  *

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.”

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.”

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.”

The final talk of the spring 2011 Public Art Fund Talk series, Working with Sol is a conversation among some of the people who worked most closely with Sol LeWitt throughout his long career. Moderated by Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator, Nicholas Baume, the talk features gallerist Paula Cooper, artist Pat Steir, and Principal Assistant of Structures, Jeremy Ziemann.

This talk ties in with Public Art Fund’s upcoming exhibition at City Hall Park, Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006, opening on May 24.  For the exhibition, a map is being produced featuring works by LeWitt in public spaces in New York City — among them The New School Art Collection’s Wall Drawing #1073: Bars of Color from 2003. Visit this two-storey mural, a gift of the artist and one of his last public commissions, at Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street.

In collaboration with the School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics presents an evening of discussion on the work of John Knight. Curator Sabine Breitwieser, writer Anne Rorimer, art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and critic André Rottmann convene to examine the artist’s pivotal role in the development of institutional critique and site-specific art. Moderated by New School faculty member, Simonetta Moro, the panel takes place on the occasion of the opening of Knight’s exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery on April 7, 2011.

Since the early 1970s John Knight has dedicated his practice to mapping the intersections of art, design, and institutional power through a series of spatial interventions and graphic maneuvers. Following closely on the architectural implications of Minimalism, Knight belongs to a generation of artists including Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, and Dan Graham that has consistently addressed the ideological valences of constructed space. Working “in situ,” all of Knight’s projects address the specific demands of their context, whether it be the gallery, the museum, the library, or the commercial billboard. Recent projects include shows at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2009); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin (2009); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2008); Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló (2008).