Andrew Weiner | New York University (original) (raw)
Dissertation by Andrew Weiner
In what ways do the cultural fields of aesthetics and politics transform each other, and how does... more In what ways do the cultural fields of aesthetics and politics transform each other, and how does this relation change under specific historical circumstances? How is it possible to evaluate the history of activities that occur at the intersection of aesthetics and politics? How can we account for the way in which such practices are able to alter the very criteria by which they might be recognized or judged?
This dissertation responds to such questions by tracing the emergence of a distinct field of cultural production in West Germany and Austria in the years leading up to and through 1968, designating this field as "aesthetico-political." It seeks to determine the various conditions of possibility for these emergent forms of activity, and to examine the different models of political agency, aesthetic experience, and subjectivation they proposed. The analysis focusses on four distinct transformations: politicizations of the aesthetic (a term including but not limited to the arts); aestheticizations of politics, especially through the mediatization of the public sphere; the reorientation of artistic practices away from modernist models; and the ascendance of New Left movements. The dissertation's test cases primarily concern activities that I term "events": durational occurrences taking place in the space between aesthetics and politics.
Papers by Andrew Weiner
A text about decolonial curating, focusing on the activities of Clementine Deliss at the Weltkult... more A text about decolonial curating, focusing on the activities of Clementine Deliss at the Weltkulturen Museum.
This article examines a recent exhibition surveying the history of Capitalist Realism in West Ger... more This article examines a recent exhibition surveying the history of Capitalist Realism in West Germany during the 1960s. The essay considers the recent resurgence of interest in German Pop, and questions under what conditions Capitalist Realism might be viable as a critical concept.
This essay concerns the relation between a group of contemporary art practices, post-Tahrir polit... more This essay concerns the relation between a group of contemporary art practices, post-Tahrir politics, and the complicated legacy of pan-Arabism. It discusses work by Samah Hijawi, Celine Condorelli, Marwa Arsanios, Iman Issa, and Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The essay raises questions considering the current relevance of Tricontinentalism and other forms of decolonial socialism, and argues that the criticality of art in this conjuncture is linked to its ability to consider such questions from a position of immanence.
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Sep 2015
This text critically evaluates a recent exhibition of early work by the artists who came to be pr... more This text critically evaluates a recent exhibition of early work by the artists who came to be promoted as the Vienna Actionists: Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. It examines certain contradictions of Actionism, assessing the status of Actions as a peculiar kind of event while linking such tensions to the crisis of modernist medium-specificity and the changing politics of publicity in post-fascist Austria. The essay seeks to determine the relevance that these concerns might have in the context of the contemporary art market, in which the extremely transgressive Actionist aesthetic is easily recoded, whether as vanguardist authenticity or period kitsch.
"Universal-Specific: From Analysis to Intervention" (ETH Zurich, forthcoming)
How can we understand the conflicting appeals to universality that have been made alongside the u... more How can we understand the conflicting appeals to universality that have been made alongside the unfolding events of the so-called Arab Spring? What is the relation between these claims and the sensate forms in which they have been made public (demonstrations, global telematics, political violence, art)? And how does this conjuncture determine the responses of artists, activists, and theorists?
This essay addresses these questions by examining a range of pertinent test cases. These include Western responses to the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa; the roles of political performance and tactical media in these uprisings; debates over art depicting the events of the Arab Spring; and performance art that engages the history of pan-Arab socialism. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau, Nasser Rabbat, and Jacques Rancière, the essay seeks to develop a critical problematic that can track the relation between aesthetics, politics, and publicity in this conjuncture.
Fillip No. 19, May 2014
A conversation between myself and Bettina Funcke, who served as Head of Publications for dOCUMENT... more A conversation between myself and Bettina Funcke, who served as Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13).
Texte zur Kunst, Dec 2013
This essay examines relations between sound art and State Communism, focusing on two exhibitions:... more This essay examines relations between sound art and State Communism, focusing on two exhibitions: "Sounding the Body Electric" (Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz) and "Revolutions Per Minute" (Colgate University, NY).
Sarai Reader 09: Projections
Afterall, Feb 2013
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Power + Practice: The Annual Report (CCA Social Practice MFA publication), 2012
When we speak of power we mean something essentially abstract: weaponized algorithms; structural ... more When we speak of power we mean something essentially abstract: weaponized algorithms; structural inequalities; financial instruments that can be deployed but not controlled, devised but not explained.
Audience as Subject, Aug 2012
Journal of Visual Culture, Mar 2012
Catalog Essays by Andrew Weiner
Clayton Patterson: Outside In, Jun 2015
An essay on the social history of the Lower East Side as refracted through the activities of Clay... more An essay on the social history of the Lower East Side as refracted through the activities of Clayton Patterson: street tapes, "the people's photography," media activism, assemblage, archival research, tattoos, oral history, hat design, political provocation, etc.
In what ways do the cultural fields of aesthetics and politics transform each other, and how does... more In what ways do the cultural fields of aesthetics and politics transform each other, and how does this relation change under specific historical circumstances? How is it possible to evaluate the history of activities that occur at the intersection of aesthetics and politics? How can we account for the way in which such practices are able to alter the very criteria by which they might be recognized or judged?
This dissertation responds to such questions by tracing the emergence of a distinct field of cultural production in West Germany and Austria in the years leading up to and through 1968, designating this field as "aesthetico-political." It seeks to determine the various conditions of possibility for these emergent forms of activity, and to examine the different models of political agency, aesthetic experience, and subjectivation they proposed. The analysis focusses on four distinct transformations: politicizations of the aesthetic (a term including but not limited to the arts); aestheticizations of politics, especially through the mediatization of the public sphere; the reorientation of artistic practices away from modernist models; and the ascendance of New Left movements. The dissertation's test cases primarily concern activities that I term "events": durational occurrences taking place in the space between aesthetics and politics.
A text about decolonial curating, focusing on the activities of Clementine Deliss at the Weltkult... more A text about decolonial curating, focusing on the activities of Clementine Deliss at the Weltkulturen Museum.
This article examines a recent exhibition surveying the history of Capitalist Realism in West Ger... more This article examines a recent exhibition surveying the history of Capitalist Realism in West Germany during the 1960s. The essay considers the recent resurgence of interest in German Pop, and questions under what conditions Capitalist Realism might be viable as a critical concept.
This essay concerns the relation between a group of contemporary art practices, post-Tahrir polit... more This essay concerns the relation between a group of contemporary art practices, post-Tahrir politics, and the complicated legacy of pan-Arabism. It discusses work by Samah Hijawi, Celine Condorelli, Marwa Arsanios, Iman Issa, and Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The essay raises questions considering the current relevance of Tricontinentalism and other forms of decolonial socialism, and argues that the criticality of art in this conjuncture is linked to its ability to consider such questions from a position of immanence.
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Sep 2015
This text critically evaluates a recent exhibition of early work by the artists who came to be pr... more This text critically evaluates a recent exhibition of early work by the artists who came to be promoted as the Vienna Actionists: Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. It examines certain contradictions of Actionism, assessing the status of Actions as a peculiar kind of event while linking such tensions to the crisis of modernist medium-specificity and the changing politics of publicity in post-fascist Austria. The essay seeks to determine the relevance that these concerns might have in the context of the contemporary art market, in which the extremely transgressive Actionist aesthetic is easily recoded, whether as vanguardist authenticity or period kitsch.
"Universal-Specific: From Analysis to Intervention" (ETH Zurich, forthcoming)
How can we understand the conflicting appeals to universality that have been made alongside the u... more How can we understand the conflicting appeals to universality that have been made alongside the unfolding events of the so-called Arab Spring? What is the relation between these claims and the sensate forms in which they have been made public (demonstrations, global telematics, political violence, art)? And how does this conjuncture determine the responses of artists, activists, and theorists?
This essay addresses these questions by examining a range of pertinent test cases. These include Western responses to the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa; the roles of political performance and tactical media in these uprisings; debates over art depicting the events of the Arab Spring; and performance art that engages the history of pan-Arab socialism. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau, Nasser Rabbat, and Jacques Rancière, the essay seeks to develop a critical problematic that can track the relation between aesthetics, politics, and publicity in this conjuncture.
Fillip No. 19, May 2014
A conversation between myself and Bettina Funcke, who served as Head of Publications for dOCUMENT... more A conversation between myself and Bettina Funcke, who served as Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13).
Texte zur Kunst, Dec 2013
This essay examines relations between sound art and State Communism, focusing on two exhibitions:... more This essay examines relations between sound art and State Communism, focusing on two exhibitions: "Sounding the Body Electric" (Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz) and "Revolutions Per Minute" (Colgate University, NY).
Sarai Reader 09: Projections
Afterall, Feb 2013
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Power + Practice: The Annual Report (CCA Social Practice MFA publication), 2012
When we speak of power we mean something essentially abstract: weaponized algorithms; structural ... more When we speak of power we mean something essentially abstract: weaponized algorithms; structural inequalities; financial instruments that can be deployed but not controlled, devised but not explained.
Audience as Subject, Aug 2012
Journal of Visual Culture, Mar 2012
Clayton Patterson: Outside In, Jun 2015
An essay on the social history of the Lower East Side as refracted through the activities of Clay... more An essay on the social history of the Lower East Side as refracted through the activities of Clayton Patterson: street tapes, "the people's photography," media activism, assemblage, archival research, tattoos, oral history, hat design, political provocation, etc.
"Maybe one must begin with some particular places" (Guayaba Press, forthcoming)
This essay is about Joachim Koester's 2012 moving image installation "Maybe One Should Begin with... more This essay is about Joachim Koester's 2012 moving image installation "Maybe One Should Begin with Some Particular Places," which depicts a re-enactment of a performance workshop run by the experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski outside Mexico City during the 1980s.
The essay examines "Maybe" in relation to Koester's mode of speculative artistic research. It seeks to elaborate how the artist's idea of "invisible indexes" informs the installation's engagement with bodily comportment, site-specificity, the history of coloniality, and the institutions of contemporary art. The discussion touches on Grotowski's workshops, the Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán, the early history of ethnographic cinema, and recent debates about the "post-secular" status of contemporary art. It seeks to situate "Maybe" in relation to recent critical and curatorial discourse on the politics of ontology: the 2010 exhibition "Animism," the uptake of "new materialisms," including object-oriented ontology, and the decolonial anthropology of theorists like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The essay closes by arguing that while Koester's project exemplifies the critical potential of quasi-animism as a mode of artistic research, such practices can't be disentangled from the cultural logic of neoliberalism.
The Ninth Page: Etel Adnan's Journalism, 1972-74, May 2013
A critical text regarding four exhibitions by Ai Weiwei in New York City in December 2016.
A review of Simon Denny's 2016 exhibition "Blockchain Future States."
A review of the 2016 exhibition "John Akomfrah," held at Lisson Gallery in New York City.
A review of the exhibition "Xerox Book", on view at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City, Fall 2015.
A review of the exhibition "David Hammons: Five Decades," on view at Mnuchin Gallery New York, Sp... more A review of the exhibition "David Hammons: Five Decades," on view at Mnuchin Gallery New York, Spring 2016.
A short text on Cameron Rowland's recent exhibition "91020000" at Artists Space in New York.
A review of the exhibition "Greater New York", which opened at MoMA P.S.1 in October 2015.
Art Agenda, May 2015
Review of the 2015 edition of the Frieze New York art fair.
Art Agenda, Feb 2015
Review of the 2015 New Museum Triennial.
Texte zur Kunst #94, May 2014
Texte zur Kunst, Jan 2013
Texte zur Kunst, Apr 2011
afterimage, May 2010
What might it mean for artists to claim historical modernisms as source material or as a field fo... more What might it mean for artists to claim historical modernisms as source material or as a field for research? If the conspicuous increase in such "sub-modernist" practices marks a shift in the protocols of appropriation, it also reads as an involution of modernist aesthetics and modernism's self-reflexivity. This odd crossing suggests that the relation between artistic modernism and postmodernism--and between cultural modernity and postmodernity--is much more unstable than often thought. Such problems have regained their pertinence in light of a recent revival of modernist aesthetics. Following the 2007 "documenta," the high-profile curators Nicolas Bourriaud, Sabine Breitwieser, and Sabine Folie have all sought to test that exhibition's hypothesis that modernity somehow forms "our antiquity." The simultaneity of these responses indicates something more than curatorial groupthink, prompting the question, Why now?
Radical Philosophy, Mar 2015
A review of Gabriel Rockhill's "Radical History and the Politics of Art" (Columbia, 2014).
afterimage, Aug 2008
return engagements making memory matter: strategies of remembrance in contemporary art by lisa sa... more return engagements making memory matter: strategies of remembrance in contemporary art by lisa saltzman chicago: the university of chicago press, 2006 128 pp./$20.00 (sb)
Over the last two decades interest in global contemporary art has surged sharply, whether on the ... more Over the last two decades interest in global contemporary art has surged sharply, whether on the commercial market, across the biennial circuit, or in the university. However, the speed of these developments has often outstripped our understanding of how such art might matter. What sort of assumptions about community, historicity, and universality subtend our concept of the "global contemporary"? What risks do we run by using this term without scrutiny? In what ways is the notion of the global contemporary entangled with or even determined by the hegemony of advanced neoliberal capitalism? How might we schematize the conditions under which aesthetics and politics can be most effectively articulated within our current conjuncture?
This talk engages such questions by examining the recent emergence of a hybrid space between art and politics—the space of forms like social practice and artistic research. It traces the development of this "aesthetico-political" sphere back to the complex cultural politics of 1968 in Central Europe. Focusing on West Germany and Austria, the paper surveys the proliferation of new event forms like Media Actions, which sought to function both symbolically and directly. Moving back to the present, it evaluates the ongoing institutionalization and globalization of aesthetico-political activity through platforms like the 2011 Creative Time exhibition Living as Form. It closes by examining examples of practices that position the history of regional socialisms as a critical counterweight to symptomatic idealizations of the global contemporary.
In recent years the “global contemporary” has emerged as a popular, influential rubric for the ex... more In recent years the “global contemporary” has emerged as a popular, influential rubric for the exhibition and reception of new art. This term has been the subject of numerous scholarly conferences and publications; it has also been the theme of many biennials, whether implicitly or explicitly. Broadly speaking we might even say that the global contemporary is the frame of reference from which much current art derives its significance. At first glance this development might seem beneficial, if not surprising, given the way it has brought together the well-established academic discourse of globalization with more recent critical and art-historical discussions of contemporaneity. Some might even claim that the global contemporary occupies a privileged position of criticality, given its proximity to the transnational protest movements that have forced their way on to the world stage in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
However, this paper takes a different point of departure –– namely, that the global contemporary can’t neatly be extracted from the hegemony of advanced neoliberal capitalism. As scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty and David Harvey have argued, the global is often as much ideologeme as it is concept, a false universal that conjures away political antagonisms while masking the function of international divisions of labor. And while much of the art world views contemporaneity as a self-evident good or an end in itself, few seem to register the ways in which the exchange of art effectively converts different forms of “nowness” into surplus value, or the role that critics and art historians play in this process. Against these tendencies, this paper engages the following questions: In what ways can we understand the global contemporary as something like the “cultural logic” of neoliberal hegemony, to use Fredric Jameson’s formulation? What type of artistic, critical, and curatorial practices might best oppose this instrumentality? And what sort of political and theoretical implications emerge from this shift in viewpoint?
The paper argues that the history of the Non-Aligned Movement is one important site from which we might begin to work through such questions. It examines three examples in which contemporary art has been situated in relation to this alternative, oppositional mode of globality, focusing on cases that address the history of pan-Arab socialism: a photo-installation by Celine Condorelli which analyzes the nationalization of the Egyptian cotton industry under Gamal Nasser; a video essay by Marwa Asanios which draws on the socialist magazine Al Hilal; and a performance by Samah Hijawi that restages modified versions of Nasser’s speeches in public spaces in Jordan, the U.A.E., and occupied Palestine. The paper closes by examining the recent exhibition Meeting Points 7, in which the curatorial collective What, How, and For Whom? sought to position the history of regional socialisms as a critical counterweight to symptomatic idealizations of the global contemporary.
Lecture-performance delivered as part of Thomas Hirschhorn's "Flamme Éternelle" exhibition. "... more Lecture-performance delivered as part of Thomas Hirschhorn's "Flamme Éternelle" exhibition.
"In this sense, democracy never appears, at least not if appearance means anything like what we have come to expect from this term. Democracy is not summoned on demand with a mouse-click. It does not happen in prime time or on election day. It does not look like a candidate or an advertisement or a poster or a march or a barricade. Democracy might be what appears to be least like its most widely circulated forms. It might be that which most appears otherwise –– a phenomenon whose perception accords to emergent codes of resemblance or unfamiliar patterns of analogy. It might happen as a flicker, a murmur, an act of trembling, silent refusal. It might appear as a question, happening like questions happen."
Western responses to the events of the Arab Spring have tended to mobilize different rhetorics of... more Western responses to the events of the Arab Spring have tended to mobilize different rhetorics of universality. Many commentators in the liberal media have touted the virtues of the so-called Facebook Revolution, with some proclaiming: “We are all Arabs now.” Left intellectuals like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have made more qualified arguments for the universality of the uprisings, linking them to global anti-austerity movements and the history of socialist revolutions. However, such viewpoints often fail to grasp the more ambiguous character of these events, in which universalizing claims are entangled with conditions that are particular or singular, not to mention shifting, contested, and incompatible with Western expectations. How might we think universality otherwise, so as to correct this imbalance? What sort of broader implications might this abstract analysis have for proponents of direct intervention, whether through art or activism? In what ways do such actions function as a kind of experimental research, providing alternative models for artists, critics, activists, historians, and theorists?
This paper engages these questions by examining specific intersections between aesthetics and politics in the context of the Arab Spring, tracing movements between local spaces (the street, the square) and transnational arenas (global news networks, the biennial circuit). It opens with a discussion of two public performances that predated the events of the Arab Spring: Samah Hijawi’s Where are the Arabs? (2008, Amman, Jordan) and Amal Kenawy’s Silence of the Lambs (2009, Cairo, Egypt). Hijawi’s piece was staged for a non-art audience in a public market, and consisted of a re-enactment of speeches by Gamal Nasser, using historical citation to question the legacy of pan-Arab socialism. In Kenawy’s performance, the artist directed a group of 15 participants to cross a busy intersection on their hands and knees, resulting in a public controversy and criminal charges for those involved. The second part of the paper addresses the performative dimension of the Arab Spring, along with its coverage in the global news media. Here I consider the occupation as an act of embodied, precarious experiment with what Judith Butler has called “sensate democracy.” Finally, I survey several recent attempts to represent the events of the Arab Spring in international art venues including Documenta and the Venice Biennale."
In 1970, the West German artist Wolf Vostell claimed that “events are weapons for the politicizat... more In 1970, the West German artist Wolf Vostell claimed that “events are weapons for the politicization of art.” That same year he edited an anthology dedicated to such new event-forms, ranging from Happenings and Fluxus concerts to the Chicago 8 trial, protests at Documenta, and the “events of 1968.” How can we historicize this interpenetration of aesthetics and politics, and to what extent does this precedent inform more recent efforts to recuperate the event as a rubric for critical art practice? In what ways was Vostell’s notion of the weaponized event symptomatic of more systemic contradictions, and why might these problems still matter today?
This paper engages such questions along three axes, the first of which is historical. Here I chart the marked proliferation of event-structures in German-speaking Europe in the years preceding 1968. Drawing on the first publications dedicated to this phenomenon (Vostell’s Actions, and Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT’s Vienna), I track the evolution of the event as an intrinsically dual form, devised to function both symbolically and directly. I argue that this development took place within an emergent space between “art” and “life,” a field that I designate as “aesthetico-political,” and link to the increasing mediatization of everyday life. The second part of the paper explores the implications of this history for philosophy and aesthetics. Against the prevailing Badiouian and Deleuzean accounts of the event, I seek to challenge the ahistoricism of Jacques Rancière’s influential theory of the politics of aesthetics, and also to revise Jacques Derrida’s messianic conception of événement along the more contingent lines proposed by Bernard Stiegler in his theory of événementialisation. Finally, I examine the contemporary implications of these questions by considering an example of the collision between activist aesthetics and the new event culture of the museum: MoMA’s acquisition and re-performance of the collective 9 Scripts From a Nation at War.
In 2009 the conservative TV host Glenn Beck denounced The Coming Insurrection, a manifesto first ... more In 2009 the conservative TV host Glenn Beck denounced The Coming Insurrection, a manifesto first published in France by the Invisible Committee, an anonymous group on the anarchist left. Building on allegations of terrorism first made by the French police, Beck has since linked the book to the perceived threats of radical Islam and the Occupy movement. That same year, Colorado’s Aspen Art Museum staged the first US exhibition of work by the Paris-based Claire Fontaine, the moniker for a collective that promotes its fictional namesake as a “readymade artist,” a “nonspecific singularity,” and an “existential terrorist." As such statements suggest, Fontaine’s work operates between neo-conceptual art, post-structuralist theory, and militant rhetoric.
What might these seemingly disparate events possibly have to do with each other? What could they tell us about how discourses of terror are informed by contingent relations between aesthetics, politics, and technical media? This paper engages such questions along two axes, starting with a key historical precedent: the militarization of the West German New Left during the years 1967-1970. Much like France circa 1968 –– but even more so –– this moment witnessed an unprecedented traffic between avant-garde art, critical philosophy, oppositional politics, and the mass media. I seek to retrace these exchanges and explore their contemporary implications, examining a free-speech trial involving the countercultural activists Kommune I, and also the published criticism of Ulrike Meinhof, who was a prominent columnist before joining the notorious Red Army Faction. The second part of the paper returns to consider the larger conjuncture within which Claire Fontaine and Glenn Beck coexist. Reading Fontaine’s sculptural and installational works alongside her published texts, I argue that the prevailing economy of spectacle forces equivalences between unlikely counterparts: the timeworn humanist trope of artist-as-revolutionary, and more recent figure of the leftist as a monstrous, often Orientalized terrorist. In doing so, I question how the apparently inhuman mediation of technics subtends the larger political temporality within which revolution is thought to occur.
The contemporary art world often represents itself as a space of unparalleled freedom, and this m... more The contemporary art world often represents itself as a space of unparalleled freedom, and this might easily seem to be so. Whether in exhibitions, publications, or the symposia associated with the so-called “new institutions,” current discourses on art tend to encourage types of critique, experimentation, and provocation that encounter resistance elsewhere. At the same time, knowledge of such freedoms uneasily coexists with the fact that contemporary art is of course a luxury commodity, one produced in a niche economy whose apparent exceptionalism is belied by its embedment within the global system of neoliberal capitalism. On this view, the freedoms of art replicate or disguise those of the market, no matter how disparate these may seem.
My paper takes this conjuncture as its frame in evaluating the ongoing reception of both neo-Marxist theory and new media within art institutions in the North Atlantic. For decades such spaces have been an important conduit for both Marxism and new media: one thinks of how art journals like October helped popularize Benjamin, Althusser, and Jameson; or of the pivotal role played by alternative art spaces in nurturing early experiments with activist video. Today, art platforms are often viewed as a refuge for practices that are deemed overly threatening or insufficiently marketable. Yet however welcome such freedom may be, I argue that we must attend more closely to its costs, grasping how the potentially radical effects of art, philosophy, and media are often neutralized through processes of selective uptake and distortion.
I begin by assessing the recent, rapid assimilation of the philosophy of Jacques Rancière within sectors of the art world. Over the last five years Rancière has published numerous texts on contemporary art and was even featured in a special issue of Artforum. Although it is worth considering the reasons behind this development –– which include the seemingly opposed phenomena of theory celebrity and theory fatigue –– I focus on its consequences and implications. Has Rancière’s idiosyncratic, vexed relationship to Marxism enabled him to be misread as a post-Marxist theorist? Have Rancière’s interests in equality, proletarian labor, and democracy made him a figure of fantasy for affective laborers in a stratified, often oligarchic art world? What potential nevertheless inheres in Rancière’s critique of the longstanding opposition between autonomy and heteronomy?
The paper then considers another unlikely candidate for public attention: the new media artist Cory Arcangel, who enjoyed a 2011 retrospective at the Whitney Museum at age 33. Arcangel’s work often engages recently obsolesced technologies like 8-bit videogame consoles, and might thus be termed “old new media art.” This approach could seem a welcome corrective to the widespread fetishization of production value in photography and installed video, and would appear to be consistent with Benjamin’s valorization of obsolescent media (a position recently revived by Rosalind Krauss in her influential theory of the “post-medium condition”). However, I argue that Arcangel’s work actually reproduces capitalist ideologemes at several levels, particularly in the way its insistent references to the neo-avant-gardes mimic the procedures of branding. The paper closes by considering alternative models for critical media art practice, ones that exemplify an aesthetico-political logic that I term “specific heteronomy.”
One of the most widely recognizable images from the history of underground film is that of the In... more One of the most widely recognizable images from the history of underground film is that of the Invisible Cinema, the screening room designed by P. Adams Sitney, Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, and the Austrian emigrant Peter Kubelka. Though the space itself no longer exists, it nevertheless remains a potent emblem of a particularly influential paradigm for the reception of alternative film practices. With its seats designed to minimize the viewer’s peripheral vision, the Invisible Cinema represented an ideal of cinema as a rigorously self-reflexive pursuit through which the sensuous materiality of film could be registered in conditions of unmediated opticality. This model was essentially a translation of modernist theories of medium specificity into cinematic terms. Such an approach decisively informed the early reception of experimental filmmaking, as for example in the work of Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. Some measure of its lasting impact can be seen in Krauss’ theorization of the “post-medium condition,” which opposes the criticality of structural film to the symptomatic heteronomy of video, linked by implication to other non-formalist moving image practices.
However central this model has been, it fails to register the fact that a large amount of experimental production oriented itself explicitly against the ideal of autonomy that the Invisible Cinema represented. This paper aims to remedy this oversight by surveying a field of practices that were tangent to but markedly divergent from Kubelka’s. In the mid- to late-1960s, while Kubelka was in New York helping to found Anthology Film Archives, a number of filmmakers came together in Vienna to organize the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative; this group included Kurt Kren, VALIE EXPORT, Peter Weibel, Hans Scheugl, and Ernst Schmidt, Jr. While the Cooperative gradually made contacts with other contemporary neo-avant-gardes –– including the Vienna Group, the Actionists, Fluxus, and the West German underground film movement –– they remained relatively insular, producing an idiosyncratic variant of Expanded Cinema.
My paper argues that this practice of erweitertes Kino can be understood as both a relocation and a retemporalization of cinema. In the activities of the Cooperative, cinema expanded not only into new sites of reception, including the university, the street, and the political demonstration, but also into new event-structures, in this case drawing on earlier Actionist experiments. On this view, we should also ask the question: “When was expanded cinema?” What models of public appearance did it adopt or propose, and what did it presume about the time of the political? While I examine how this field of production contested dominant accounts of medium, particularly the notion of “intermedia” that grew out of Fluxus and informed the influential periodical interfunktionen, the paper places more emphasis on how it sought to oppose the notion of aesthetic autonomy that the Invisible Cinema represented. It analyzes erweitertes Kino as a form of critical heteronomy –– as a singularly visible cinema –– situating it relative to an emergent interpenetration of aesthetics and politics, a field that I term the aesthetico-political.
The discussion begins with an account of Kurt Kren’s collaborations with the Actionist Otto Mühl, examining how Kren’s highly disjunctive techniques of in-camera montage effectively called attention to the problem of time-synthesis within the Action as a form. Taking Kren’s falling-out with Mühl to represent a decisive turn within the development of Actionism, the paper proceeds to survey three test cases in order to gauge the implications of erweitertes Kino. It first considers Cutting, a Cinema Action staged collaboratively by Weibel and EXPORT in 1968, tracing how the piece relocated montage into the socio-political field, as well as assessing its critique of contemporary McLuhanite theories of technology and media. It then profiles Scheugl’s Sugar Daddies, a 1968 screening in a public men’s room in Münich, in which Scheugl projected footage shot in a Vienna University toilet. The paper then assesses two examples that indicate the progressive radicalization of Left politics under markedly repressive conditions. The first of these, Schmidt’s Art and Revolution, depicted an infamous 1968 Action at Vienna University, which contributed to the dissolution of the Austrian New Left and led to the persecution and exile of several Actionists. The second, Weibel and EXPORT’s Art War Campaign (1969), reflected a resultant sense of political desperation, with the artists not only simulating but even perpetrating violent acts against their audience, literally taking cover behind the screen.
In reconstructing this genealogy, I mean to show how it can help us understand ways in which existing accounts of underground film, Expanded Cinema, and contemporary “post-medium” production (Krauss, Liz Kotz, Branden Joseph) still rely on residually modernist assumptions about medium-specificity. Against the potentially retrograde implications of such approaches, I argue for a more dialectical engagement. On the one hand, erweitertes Kino exhibited an unwavering commitment to a heteronomous conception of art as an unforeseeable event, and certain aspects of this model resonate with progressive contemporary practices. On the other, actions that were designed as political interventions were instead received as art, or, worse, as entertainment, suggesting a process of adaptation by which spectacular capitalism was able to recuperate even the forms that might have been thought most dangerous to it. Ultimately, I argue that we should think of Expanded Cinema as occupying this fraught crossing: a site where the potentially emancipatory expansion into the political arena came at the risk of complicity with other, less salutary forms of expansion, namely emergent forms of capitalist colonization.
The politics of the early AIDS crisis in the US were primarily determined by three intersecting f... more The politics of the early AIDS crisis in the US were primarily determined by three intersecting forces: ascendant neoliberalism, popular religious fundmentalism, and emergent techniques of biopower. Within this conjuncture, HIV-infected populations were often deemed expendable or even deserving of punishment. How did these circumstances condition the rhetoric of radical activism? What influence has this field of production exerted on subsequent movements, and what relevance does it currently maintain? How can its singular aspects countervail prevalent assumptions regarding 1980s identity politics, helping us think the relations between transversal organization, an ethics of finitude, and the aesthetic mobilization of dissensus?
This paper engages such questions by considering initiatives undertaken by the activist coalition ACT UP, which took forms as diverse as anonymous graffiti, independent medical research, posters on city buses, intermedia installations, and direct actions. These interventions were often distinguished by hybridized modes of address that drew variously from different factions of the New Left, the advertising and design industries, and the artistic neo-avant-gardes. My analysis therefore situates ACT UP in relation to ongoing debates concerning Jacques Rancière’s influential theorization of the linkages between aesthetics and politics. I argue that Rancière’s notion of a “community of sense,” which radicalizes the Kantian sensus communis, helps explain the implications of these aesthetico-political tactics, even as the historical specificity of such forms implicitly questions the epochal frame of Rancière’s work. Against the prevailing ahistoricism of Agambenian accounts of biopolitics, I claim that the history of ACT UP indicates an alternative horizon of oppositional action, one structured by transient solidarities and a fuller recognition of the aporias that both enable and constrain collective agency.
When does a public appear as an event? This paper rearticulates these terms by viewing the eve... more When does a public appear as an event?
This paper rearticulates these terms by viewing the event as the contingent manifestation and contestation of publicity, rather than as a mere means to this end. It thus seeks to mediate the antinomy between theories of the event that stress its affinity to spectacle (Boorstin, Stiegler) and those that highlight its emancipatory potential (Badiou, Rancière). Against the institutional tendency to recuperate radical action as performance art, the paper engages the event as an undecidable, reciprocally transformative encounter between aesthetics and politics. It analyzes a range of radical practices that emerged in 1960s Vienna, tracing differentiations within the field of Actionism, which has long been misapprehended as a unified movement by its critics and advocates alike.
Opening with discussion of the conflicts inherent in certain now-canonized Actions, it then surveys the uptake of three alternative event-structures: the action film (Kren), the action lecture (Wiener, Weibel), and the media action (EXPORT, Scheugl). The discussion tracks the increased technical mediation of time-synthesis, and the shifting relation between left movements, juridical institutions, and the Austrian press. In doing so, it registers the emergence of a specific type of disagreement: an oppositional tactic grounded in the practices of recombination and contradiction, staging dissensus as an immanent dispute over the conditions regulating claims to publicity. While my account resonates with the Rancièrean theorization of disagreement as the democratic redistribution of public roles, it challenges Rancière’s relatively ahistorical epochalism by stressing the contingent determinations of these event-formations.
The contradictory concept of permanent transition recalls the dialectical tensions subtending var... more The contradictory concept of permanent transition recalls the dialectical tensions subtending various modernities: their ceaseless manufacture of both innovation and obsolescence, or their aspirations to found utopia on creative destruction. This suggests an unfinished, manifold, and mutable modernity, troubling received distinctions between modern, post-modern, and contemporary. Yet the idea also designates phenomena specific to our current global conjuncture, like the ever-accelerating expansion of markets, including those for artistic and academic labor. A rhetoric of permanent transition could inform an immanent analysis of this singular cultural constellation, but could also advertise a novelty-obsessed commercial art, or mask the precarity of mobile labor in post-Fordist economies. How, then, to understand this dual valence of permanent transition: its affinities with both continuity and contingency, its potential to be either critical or symptomatic? How can we know that the very object of this conference is not itself a sort of double agent?
My paper engages these questions by examining an emergent paradigm situated at this crux: the art of sub-modernism, a term I use to denote recent practices that appropriate and internalize the forms and logic of historical modernisms. This field currently supports much artistic production, and is an increasingly common curatorial rubric. The paper analyzes the 2009 exhibition Modernism as Ruin (Generali Foundation, Vienna), which included canonical pieces by Smithson and Matta-Clark alongside newer work by Cyprien Gaillard, Florian Pumhösl, and Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij. It considers how such practices risk nostalgia, left melancholia, and a neoliberal post-historicism, while questioning how they are structured or even made possible by the aftereffects of colonial modernity. The paper ultimately asks whether contemporary critical art might be thought along Ranciérean terms as a permanent transition between incommensurable logics of intervention: one structured by autonomous resistant form, the other by the ongoing, transversal rearticulation of aesthetics and politics.
In the gallery, on the market, and across the festival circuit, video is now so ubiquitous as to ... more In the gallery, on the market, and across the festival circuit, video is now so ubiquitous as to seem inevitable. However, recent curatorial attempts to document the ascendancy of projected and installed media have generally failed to account for certain critical transformations that video-based practices have undergone in the process of institutionalization: the hybridization of video with other imaging technologies, a tendency towards immersive virtuality, and the further entrenchment of the long-established opposition between video art and video activism. This oversight threatens to further consolidate a parochial view of early video production, even as such work proves to be a valuable archive for a range of contemporary critical practices. Given such a conjuncture, this paper seeks to trace an alternate genealogy of emergent video by suspending the distinction between video art and video activism. Its aim is neither to historicize nor abolish these categories, but rather to map a broader spectrum of early video production, one that was unified around an increasingly acute concern with the politics of broadcast television as it impacted the fate of the New Left. In doing so, it seeks to dislodge video from its prevailing art-historical reception as a medium, or as the threshold of a “post-medium condition.” Instead, it approaches video as a site of mediation that registers historically contingent crossings between the aesthetic and the political, enabling the tactical significance of this relation to be reconsidered.
The paper’s primary test case is Wipe Cycle, a multi-channel video “environment” executed in May 1969 by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider. Often cited but still largely unanalyzed, this piece occupied a point of interference between various frequencies on the spectrum of video practice: it appeared at the first New York gallery show devoted to video art, a show which was crucial in the commercial legitimation of video, but was also instrumental in the formation of an alternative video community in New York. The discussion situates Wipe Cycle with respect to related precedents (early video sculpture, kinetic art, Minimalist aesthetics) and contemporary practices (the cybernetic sculpture of Les Levine and Hans Haacke, documentary videography). Drawing on Gillette and Schneider’s writings in Radical Software, the journal they helped publish as founders of the Raindance Corporation, my analysis seeks to show how Wipe Cycle departs from its original conception to venture a more radical immanent critique of a televisual political economy and the videographic constitution of public space. More specifically, it addresses how the installation’s layering of closed-circuit feedback and live broadcast TV not only temporalized the sculptural object, but also problematized television’s capacity to alter the spectator’s experience of an event, along with her synthesis of the time within which it occurs. Following Bernard Stiegler’s account of technically mediated temporalization, the paper aims to underscore the strategic necessity of this dynamic as it forces us to reconsider longstanding assumptions about television’s power to induce amnesia.
But if Wipe Cycle thus merits reconsideration as a model for a critical engagement with televisual time, it nevertheless exhibits contradictions that were typical of much oppositional video. The issue here is not utopianism so much as a consistently instrumentalist view of technology, coupled with an inability to effectively indicate oppositional modes of collectivity. This untenable position bears a strong resemblance to the problems of the New Left in its encounter with the mass media. The paper traces the contours of this history by examining the progressive aestheticization of oppositional politics, considering the impulse towards “guerrilla television” in relation to the fragmentation and militarization of the Left. Assessing tapes by the Videofreex, TVTV, the People’s Video Theater, and Portable Channel, the paper proceeds to oppose an incipient politics of identity with an alternative politics of time, prioritizing encounter, latency, and resistance to the demands of the mass-mediated news cycle. It closes by elaborating the relevance such a politics might retain for a field of contemporary work, ranging from Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas to K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood’s New Report.
But it also means to frame questions with a wider bearing on contemporary criticism and scholarship: How has the televisual mass-mediatization of politics conditioned the frameworks through which we recognize or understand the event? What analogies, discrepancies, and slippages exist between technology and instrument, spectator and participant, event and action? In what ways can oppositional movements thwart the received expectation that events be punctual, legible, spectacular, or revolutionary? And how can theory most effectively come to terms with the highly overdetermined character of the televised event as a circuit, a mediator, and a site of contestation?
After a period of marginalization, the theory of spectacle has been revitalized recently in criti... more After a period of marginalization, the theory of spectacle has been revitalized recently in critical interventions by Sven Lütticken, Claire Bishop, and the Retort collective. If this development indicates Debord’s renewed pertinence to such emergent phenomena as a “shock and awe” neoliberalism and a post-secular left, it simultaneously resists the domestication of Situationist practices as the history of the SI migrates from the street to the gallery and seminar room. Yet this return to spectacle, however timely, risks perpetuating the oversights constraining Debord’s initial account: its overconfident distinction of ideology from a putatively unmediated reality, and its vanguardist model of political action.
This paper engages such problems by reconsidering a field of activity contemporaneous with but divergent from the activities of the SI, correlating the spectacular colonization of the everday with shifts in the status of the event, understood here as a contingent, transformative encounter between aesthetics and politics. It analyzes radical practices that appeared in 1960s Vienna, tracing differentiations within the field of Actionism, long misapprehended as a unified movement by its critics and advocates alike. The discussion first considers the conflicts inherent in now-canonized Actions, focussing on their provocation of scandal through publicized transgressions. It then surveys the uptake of three alternative event-structures –– the action film, the action lecture, and the media action –– attending to shifts in the technical mediation of time-synthesis, and to the relations between left movements, juridical institutions, and the Austrian mass media. In doing so, it registers the emergence of a specific mode of disagreement as an immanent, aesthetico-political contestation of spectacular hegemony, relying on the tactics of recombination and contradiction. While this account resonates with Jacques Rancière’s account of democracy as a redistribution of the sensible, it challenges Rancière’s relatively ahistorical epochalism by stressing the contingent determinations of these events.
Syllabus for a first-year course that aims to introduce BFA students to the field of global art h... more Syllabus for a first-year course that aims to introduce BFA students to the field of global art history.
This course surveys historical and contemporary issues in the exhibition and display of art and m... more This course surveys historical and contemporary issues in the exhibition and display of art and material culture. The course explores the theory and practice of exhibition production, focusing on the following subjects: the history of collections; the emergence of the modern museum; typologies of exhibition; the rhetoric of exhibition making; art world economies; the role of the curator; the politics of publicity; the global traffic in contemporary art.
The history of art since 1945 is typically understood in terms of the ascendance, crisis, and tra... more The history of art since 1945 is typically understood in terms of the ascendance, crisis, and transformation of modernism. In this account, a select group of 19th and early 20th-century European avant-gardes established the models by which subsequent advanced art would be produced and judged. The influence of centers like Paris, Berlin, and Moscow was disrupted by the events of World War II, after which New York City became the hub of an increasingly global art world, one in which modernist styles were the common language. However, the dominance of modernism, which began to be challenged in the 1950s, was gravely undermined in the 1960s as successive movements like Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art challenged its most basic assumptions. In the decades that followed, as these critical tendencies themselves became accepted wisdom, modernism was transcended (as in the case of postmodernism), recuperated (by artists like the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s), or transformed (as when contemporary artists use modernist histories as the basis for artistic research). In recent years, prominent critics and curators have even tested the idea that “modernism is our antiquity,” serving much the same role for us as the classical era did for the modernists.
Like all “master narratives,” this one has its share of truth, and we will begin our survey of modern and contemporary art by studying its core features. We will evaluate some of the most influential critical accounts of modernism and modernity, viewing these categories from political, economic, and artistic perspectives. Surveying the development of the historic avant-gardes in Western and Central Europe, we will define and contrast two competing critical models: one based on a commitment to formalism, the other on the transformation of art’s social function. Turning to the postwar period, we will explore the moment of “high modernism,” when various forms of abstraction were thought to be the paragon of artistic achievement –– and when this consensus supported the new cultural politics of U.S. hegemony.
Moving forward, we will examine the ways in which the dominance of modernism came into question, whether in new forms like Happenings and installations, or in locations outside the North Atlantic that were thought by many to be “peripheral.” We will pay close attention to the numerous forms that questioned modernist dogmas during the 1960s and 70s, including performance, actions, Arte Povera, Land Art, artists’ publications, social practice, and various modes of media art. The course will end by examining some of the many ways in which modernism has survived its supposed demise, whether on the art market, across the biennial circuit, or even in the experimental forms that would seem to have left it behind.
However, even as we tell ourselves this story about modernism, we will also be critically attending to its oversights. In surveying the broad range of pre-war modernisms, we will ask how and why American critics like Clement Greenberg privileged a formalist modernism over other possible definitions, considering how these other models might allow us to better grasp the interplay between different media, or between art, technology, and mass culture. When possible, we will consider examples from fields that were often overlooked by modernist critics, including dance, textiles, and design. We will think critically about the role that exhibitions and museums have played in popularizing and historicizing art. The course will pay especially close attention to the ways in which the international hegemony of modernism was contested from its supposed margins, analyzing practices from Latin America, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it aims to revise our understanding of how this history might yet matter in the present and future.
The primary exhibition venue for much new art is an international circuit of fairs and biennials,... more The primary exhibition venue for much new art is an international circuit of fairs and biennials, most of which are less than two decades old. Much of this art problematizes its own cosmopolitanism and novelty, depicting mobile populations or exotic locations while conforming to the most current technological or aesthetic standards. Critical discussion of such work often assumes that biennials give us the most direct access to global contemporary art, and that the concepts of “the global” and “the contemporary” are both self-evident and interrelated, or even interchangeable. But what if this isn’t the case? How might the singular form of these concepts function ideologically, blocking our understanding of conflicting geographies or uneven histories? How have international exhibitions sought to contest these relations or to alter their own function? How might such examples change our thinking about the geopolitics of art, the task of the curator, or the relations between exhibitions and their audiences?
This seminar will explore such questions by developing an alternative, “minor” history of the contemporary biennial, focusing on developments that took place outside or in opposition to the hegemony of the global North. We will begin by studying theories of postcoloniality, globalization, and “the contemporary,” and by surveying recent debates about the biennial format. We will then consider historic precedents for the ongoing biennial explosion, moving from the congresses and conventions of the decolonizing Third World through the development of periodic exhibitions in sites including Cuba, Delhi, Lagos, and Sydney. The bulk of the course will consist of case studies of important exhibitions since 1989, including the following: Dak’Art, the Johannesburg Biennial, Manifesta, the Istanbul Biennial, inSite, the Emergency Biennale of Chechnya, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Tbilisi Triennial. We will meet with several curators, critics, and art historians with expertise in this field.
Recent critical, curatorial, and art historical discourse on global art has too often been compro... more Recent critical, curatorial, and art historical discourse on global art has too often been compromised by a set of fallacies. Art from the global South is frequently read as “influenced by” (read: derivative of) Northern art forms, or interpreted according to normative, teleological models of modernization. Globalization is mistakenly viewed as a singular, purely contemporary phenomenon, or it is uncritically celebrated under the sign of a generic cosmopolitanism. Such tendencies impede a more nuanced understanding of the complex historical relationship between art production, global exchange, coloniality, and the emergent hegemony of transnational capital.
This course aims to challenge such misconceptions by considering a series of case studies from outside the North Atlantic, ranging historically from the decolonization movements of the 1960s to the present. We will start by grounding our inquiries with readings in postcolonial theory and world systems theory, as well recent critical attempts to theorize contemporaneity and globalization. We will then embark upon a number of historical studies of artworks, exhibitions, and criticism, including the following subjects: Third Cinema and the global essay film; decolonial photography in West and South Africa; alternative strains of conceptual art produced in the Second and Third Worlds; performance art and actions from the Pacific Rim and Latin America. We will then transition to the more recent past by examining two influential efforts to curate global exhibitions. The course will close by considering several contemporary developments, including social practice in the global South and neo-documentarisms from the Middle East, ending with a review of contemporary debates on the viability of global art as a critical category.
In the last decade it has become undeniably clear that the production and reception of experiment... more In the last decade it has become undeniably clear that the production and reception of experimental art has become increasingly discursive. It is now common for artists to describe their work as research, for critics to deliver “lecture-performances,” and for curators to claim that the collections of essays accompanying their exhibitions are as important as the exhibitions themselves. Concealed behind this seemingly self-evident fact are a number of complex, interrelated developments, including the crisis of modernism, the long-term effects of the new social movements of the 1960s, and the shifting political economy of culture under conditions of advanced capitalism. How might we begin to theorize this phenomenon, to understand it historically, and to gauge its implications for contemporary art practice and exhibition?
This seminar will approach such questions along three axes. First, we will engage a selection of pertinent critical concepts and historical models: Allan Kaprow’s notion of the “un-artist”; Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse; Jacques Rancière’s model of the aesthetic regime of art; Rosalind Krauss’ critique of the post-medium condition; and Guy Debord’s theorization of the integrated spectacle. Then, we will study five prominent examples of the “discursive exhibition”: Les Immatériaux (1985), co-curated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard; Democracy (1988), curated by the collective Group Material; If You Lived Here... (1989), curated by Martha Rosler; Documenta X (1997), curated by Catherine David; and Documenta 11 (2002), curated by Okwui Enwezor. We will pay close attention to the interaction between artworks and ostensibly non-artistic formats (including philosophical texts, town meetings, social activism, academic conferences, and documentary). Finally, we will turn our attention to a group of more contemporary formats that exist within the expanded field of discursive art: the social practice “summit”; the interdisciplinary research project; artistic research; pedagogical activities; and the phenomenon of the “paracuratorial,” often associated with the so-called New Institutions.
It has become increasingly common to claim that the history of modern and contemporary art is bes... more It has become increasingly common to claim that the history of modern and contemporary art is best grasped as a history of exhibitions. While such an approach has obvious advantages, particularly for curators, its implications are less clear. How might it differ from accounts that privilege artists, movements, mediums, or contexts? What sort of critical, aesthetic, and analytical criteria should structure such an undertaking? How can a history of exhibitions avoid the pitfalls of canonization? And what relevance might pre-existing models of curating retain for contemporary practices?
This seminar will investigate such questions by collectively analyzing a selection of test cases drawn from the history of exhibition-making. Our work will be directed by the following objectives: to trace important developments in the evolution of exhibition forms and curatorial practices; to register the ways in which these histories have conditioned recent artistic production and exhibition making; and to critically assess the rhetoric of the art exhibition as a form of public communication.
The course is divided into three sections. The first of these, entitled “Models,” surveys important moments in the development of the exhibition in Western modernity, ranging from the private collection, the state museum, and the salon to the modernist musem, the travelling exhibition, and the international biennial; it also attends to avant-garde activities in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The second section, “Countermodels,” seeks to trace some of the many ways in which experimental art and exhibition-making positioned itself against these historical precedents in the decades following 1945. While this section will cover such influential museum exhibitions as “Information” and “When Attitudes Become Form,” it will place equal emphasis on gallery shows, demonstrations, para-museal installations, and work in distributed media. It will further examine developments at the periphery of established North Atlantic centers. The last section, “Altermodels,” engages contemporary developments that mean to further reinvent the exhibition. Here we will look closely at the complex transformations grouped together under the term “globalization,” before examining recent tendencies in durational and social production, closing with an evaluation of the changing status of curatorial labor.
A public forum addressing the recent US presidential election, the implications of a Trump presid... more A public forum addressing the recent US presidential election, the implications of a Trump presidency, and possible means of resistance
Flyer for a screening of Isaac Julien's film "Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask"
Flyer for a screening of Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni's experimental documentary "In Search... more Flyer for a screening of Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni's experimental documentary "In Search of UIQ".
Flyer for a public screening of Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida's video essay "Strike Anywhere."
Flyer for a screening of video works by Harun Farocki.
Flyer for a screening of Ayreen Anastas' video "Pasolini Pa* Palestine."
Film :: Theory is a yearlong series of screenings, talks, and public discussions that aims to exp... more Film :: Theory is a yearlong series of screenings, talks, and public discussions that aims to explore the relation between critical thought and the moving image. Instead of viewing philosophy as a way to explain cinema or fi lm as a means to depict theory, we will explore how these mediums can work together, confront each other, or even begin to merge in the interest of larger intellectual and political projects. The series will include fi lm adaptations of critical texts, video essays about the work of specifi c philosophers, and projects based on collaboration between theorists and experimental artists. Screenings will be accompanied by informal, speculative presentations by artists, scholars, and curators, and will be followed by collective discussion and light refreshments.
Flyer for a screening of Chantal Akerman's film "News From Home".
Flyer for a screening of John Akomfrah's essay film "The Stuart Hall Project."
Flyer for a screening of Kluge's "Notes on Ideological Antiquity" and Steyerl's "Adorno's Grey."
Flyer for a screening of Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato's video essay "Assemblages."
“Film :: Theory” is a yearlong series of screenings, talks, and public discussions that aims to e... more “Film :: Theory” is a yearlong series of screenings, talks, and public discussions that aims to explore the relation between critical thought and the moving image. Instead of viewing philosophy as a way to explain cinema or film as a means to depict theory, we will explore how these mediums can work together, confront each other, or even begin to merge in the interest of larger intellectual and political projects. The series will include film adaptations of critical texts, video essays about the work of specific philosophers, and projects based on collaboration between theorists and experimental artists. Screenings will be accompanied by informal, speculative presentations by artists, scholars, and curators, and will be followed by collective discussion and light refreshments.
An artist's talk given by Ganzeer. Ganzeer is the pseudonym of an Egyptian artist operating mainl... more An artist's talk given by Ganzeer. Ganzeer is the pseudonym of an Egyptian artist operating mainly between graphic design and contemporary art since 2007. While he regards Bidoun magazine’s description of him as a “contingency artist” as quite accurate, he refers to his own practice as Concept Pop. Al-Monitor.com has placed him on a list of "50 People Shaping the Culture of the Middle East" (2013), and he is also one of the protagonists in a critically acclaimed documentary “Art War” (2014) by German director Marco Wilms.
This event will be held on Saturday, May 28 2015, and will feature the New York premiere of The O... more This event will be held on Saturday, May 28 2015, and will feature the New York premiere of The Otolith Group's essay film MEDIUM EARTH (2013), which explores the geology of California alongside the spatialized unconscious of capitalist infrastructure. Through images that appeal to the senses and the voice of a “medium” whose body is sensitive to seismic occurrences, the film listens to California’s deserts, translates what the stones write, and decodes the calligraphy of the earth’s crevices. The second part of the event will be a performance lecture entitled WHO DOES THE EARTH THINK IT IS (2014), which is based on an unofficial collection of unsolicited earthquake predictions sent to the United States Geological Survey Pasadena Field Office.