Public space is traditionally defined as a domain of free exchange, welcoming the participation of all citizens: meeting places in the city, the market, newspapers and other public media. The rise of digital technologies has a great influence on the structure of this space. Is today’s "public domain" more scattered or broader and richer than before the "digital revolution"? This question is crucial in debates about architecture, urban planning and art, and about the roles they play in society. Is the public domain still a place for acting and intervening? Where does the "public" take place nowadays and who shapes it by developing spatial and cultural strategies? How can one claim these new public spaces?
To define what’s public, and to name and identify what and who is considered to be part of the common cultural and intellectual heritage of humanity, is a fundamentally political act that affects humans and matter in different ways. While copyright or patent restrictions may expire and be renewed, the opportunity for an individual to integrate (or reintegrate) into a community may not present itself as easily. Arranged around the topic of the “Public Domain,” many of this year’s programs will consider notions of the public and how they relate to objects, people and knowledge in terms of economics, law, politics, religion, culture and psychology.
View events from Fall 2006 or Spring 2007.
Panel Discussion
Anselm Kiefer: Velimir Chlebnikov and the Sea
September 12, 2006 - 6:30 p.m.
Anselm Kiefer, Velimir Chlebnikow
and the Sea installation view
Born in Germany in 1945 and currently living in France, Anselm Kiefer is a major European painter whose remarkable body of work explores the deep, mythological currents that guide Western history. The panelists will discuss Kiefer’s work by focusing on Velimir Chlebnikov, a major body of work featuring a series of thirty paintings housed in a steel pavilion designed by the artist.
The paintings and their pavilion are Kiefer’s tribute to the visionary Russian thinker Velimir Chlebnikov (1885-1922), who lived a brief and tumultuous life as a leading figure in the Russian avant-garde through the period of World War I and the Russian revolution. Kiefer was influenced by Chlebnikov’s writings, particularly his esoteric theories about the forces that cause human conflict.
Moderator:
Harry Philbrick, exhibition curator and Director, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
Panelists:
Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Mark Rosenthal, independent curator
Presented in collaboration with The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, on occasion of the museum’s exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Velimir Chlebnikov and the Sea.
* Inaugural Lecture on “The Public Domain”
The Eclipse of the Public: The Necessity to Revitalize the Public Sphere
Richard J. Bernstein
September 14, 2006 - 6:30 p.m.
Each year, an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center’s annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that will be explored in public programs throughout the year. The lecturer introduces the theme in the broadest sense, serving as guide to the range and richness of the topic at hand, and rooting the concept within The New School’s intellectual tradition.
Thinkers associated with The New School have played a major role in rethinking the meaning of the public sphere. The inaugural lecture of the Vera List Center’s 2006-2007 theme “The Public Domain” will be delivered by Richard J. Bernstein, Vera List Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research.
Professor Bernstein will explore the meaning of the concepts of public life and public space in the works of John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Jurgen Habermas, and will consider how these concepts are relevant for understanding public freedom and democracy. The aim will be to highlight what each of them contributes to a revitalized sense of the public life of a democratic polity in the twenty-first century.
* * *
Vera List Professor of Philosophy since 1989 and formerly Dean of The New School for Social Research, Richard J. Bernstein has produced an outstanding body of scholarly work concentrating on American pragmatism; social and political philosophy; critical theory; and Anglo-American philosophy. Among his many publications are The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics And Religion Since 9/11 (2006); Radical Evil: A Philosophic Interrogation (2002); Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998); Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996); The New Constellation: The Ethical/Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity (1991); Philosophical Profiles (1986); Habermas and Modernity (editor, 1985); Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (1983); Praxis and Action (1971); and John Dewey (1966).
* This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
Panel Discussions
What Comes After: Cities, Art + Recovery
An international summit to consider the role of art and culture after crisis in cities across the globe, organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
September 15 and 16, 2006
What are the arts of emergency? How can image and text echo in the silence and sound of devastation? What role has culture in the work of reconciliation and rebuilding after violence?
For the second year, Cities, Art + Recovery brings together artists, writers, architects and scholars from Lebanon, Rwanda, South Africa, Vietnam, and other countries around the world as well as from the U.S. in direct conversation with each other to ask and answer these questions.
From Sarajevo to New Orleans, from Kigali to Beirut, artists have commented forcefully on their contemporary political and cultural predicament. As a witness, as a way of mourning, as indictment, as critique, as documentation, as an olive branch, and as a herald of hope, art forms the bedrock of recovery. New York, as a cultural capital, cannot afford to overlook the perspectives of artists in any process of rebuilding.
In a series of public programs, including performances, exhibitions, films, roundtables and a public art competition for downtown New York, Cities, Art and Recovery explores the work of art in the wake of catastrophe.
September 15, 2006
11:00 – 12:30
Artists in Conversation
Annabel Daou (Lebanon/USA) and Atef Hetata (Egypt)
In conversation with Noha Radwan (Egypt/USA)
2:00 – 4:00
Resurgent Cities: On the Lost Balkan Highway
Dragan Protic (Serbia), Marko Sancanin (Croatia), Yane Calovski (Macedonia) and Zoran Pantelic (Serbia) in conversation with Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (Serbia/USA)
4:15 – 5:45
Artists in Conversation
Yolande Mukagasana (Rwanda/Belgium) and
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) in conversation with
Brent Hayes Edwards (USA)
September 16, 2006
9:30 – 11:00
Artists in Conversation
Antjie Krog (South Africa) and Carmen Boullosa (Mexico/USA)
In conversation with Yvette Christiansë (South Africa/USA)
11:1 5 – 1:15
Artists in Conversation
Tran Luong (Vietnam), Arahmaiani (Indonesia) and Seiji Shimoda (Japan) in conversation with Yu Yeon Kim (Korea/USA)
3:00 – 5:00
Unnatural Landscapes: The Future of the City
Raul Cardenas Osuna (Mexico) Ole Bouman (Netherlands) and Dilip da Cunha (India/USA) in conversation with Raymond Gastil (USA)
A project of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Visit www.lmcc.net/recovery for venues and program information.
* Panel Discussion
Information Mapping. So Now We Can See it All?
September 25, 2006 – 6:30 pm
Panelists Henrik Mayer, Dan Dubno,
William Bevington, Joy Hirsh and
Christopher Kirwan [left-right]
Since the dawn of human documentation, information design has played a significant role in the balance of power. Rapid innovation and technological advancement create unprecedented access to a dizzying amount of ideas and data today. In response, scholars, artists and geographers have developed elaborate systems of information mapping in order to visually articulate complex and interrelated data. It is only recently, however, that information design has advanced out of graphic design and communication design restraints. What does it mean if the tangible and functioning reality, life itself, is made possible by intangible information? This panel discusses different areas in which information is decoded, presented, and processed in an over stimulated culture, and provocatively focuses on the politics of information mapping in terms of what is revealed and what is concealed.
Moderator:
William Bevington, Executive Director, Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM)
Participants:
Daniel N. Dubno, Producer and Technologist, CBS News
Joy Hirsch, Professor and Director of the fMRI Research Center, Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University, Neurological Institute
Christopher Kirwan, Parsons The New School for Design, Department of Communication Design and Technology
Henrik Mayer, artist, Reinigungsgesellschaft, Dresden/Germany
* This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
* Performative Lecture
Negativland: Adventures in Illegal Art. A Performance by Mark Hosler
September 29, 2006 – 7:00 p.m.
Snapshots featuring the young Mark Hosler
Of mythical stature in the worlds of music, performance and law, Negativland comes to New York with a film/performance/lecture presentation by one of its four members, co-founder Mark Hosler.
Negativland bills itself as a “goofy yet serious artist/activist collective of filmmakers, culture jammers, and musicians, in short an unhealthy mix of John Cage, Pink Floyd, Abbie Hoffman, 1970’s German electronic music, and old school punk rock attitude.” For over two decades, Negativland has not just touched on critical issues but has actually provoked (and in court defended) them: concepts that are today very much in the public eye such as intellectual property issues, file sharing, media literacy, the art of collage, creative activism in a media-saturated multinational world, evolving notions of art and ownership, and law in a digital age. Adventures in Illegal Art features Mark Hosler as the enigmatic anchor showing Negativland’s films in a video formatted lecture that is engaging, provocative as well as thoughtful. Negativland becomes a subliminal culture sampling service concerned with making art about everything we aren’t supposed to notice.
Presenter:
Mark Hosler, founding member of Negativland, artist, activist
* This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
Panel Discussion
Confounding Expectations 4: Photography in Context
Photographing Katrina
October 11, 2006 - 7:00 p.m.
On assignment, or on their own, hundreds of photographers rushed to New Orleans to capture the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The artists will discuss their personal experience of Katrina and how they approach emotionally charged subject matter.
Moderator:
Fred Ritchin, Associate Professor of Photography and Communications, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, founder of PixelPress
Panelists:
Stanley Greene and Kadir Von Lohuizen, photographers and co-founders of Issue
Chris Jordan, photographer
Larry Towell, photojournalist, Magnum
Katherine Wolkoff, photographer
This panel is part of the Aperture Foundation Lectures: “Confounding Expectations IV: Photography in Context,” and is presented in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation, Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School with generous support from the Kettering Family Foundation and the Henry Nias Foundation. This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Panel Discussion
Tropicália: The Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture
October 19, 2006 – 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
This is the first of four panels at various New York institutions focusing on the political climate in Brazil during military rule in the late 1960s, and the visual art, literature, music, cinema, architecture, and design created in response, reaction, and resistance to the authoritarian regime. Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture at the Bronx Museum.
This first panel will address pivotal issues that inform the Tropicália exhibitionincluding the clash between the progressive agenda set forth in the 1950s by Brazilian president Kubitscheck, the repressive period initiated by the 1964 military coup, the search for an inclusive Pan-American aesthetics, and the embrace of “antropofagia" (cultural cannibalism) in the 1960s proposed by poet Oswald de Andrade's 1920s manifesto.
Moderator:
Sergio Bessa, Director of Education, The Bronx Museum of the Arts
Panelists:
Carlos Basualdo, Curator of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art
Claudia Calirman, faculty member, Parsons The New School for Design
Christopher Dunn, Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Tulane University
Panel Discussion and Performance
The Two Way Street: Immigration and the Individual
October 21, 3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), in sponsorship with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Wolfson Center for National Affairs at The New School, launches its new public education program with an afternoon panel discussion addressing the experiences of different immigrant groups. The event is part of the citywide European Dream Festival.
Panel Discussion 3 – 5 p.m.
Moderator:
Bob Hennelly, WNYC
Panelists:
Natalia Indrimi, Curator, Center for Jewish History
Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Hunter College, CUNY
Douglas Massey, immigration scholar at Princeton University
Performance 5 – 6 p.m.
Director/choreographer Martha Clarke and the musicians from Kaos, a collaboration of American and Italian artists based on the work of Luigi Pirandello and the Taviani Brothers that will premiere at NYTW this November. Visit www.nytw.org for participant information.
Lecture
“Public Art Fund Talks,” with Dan Graham
October 24, 2006 - 6:30 p.m.
Now in its twelfth year, The Public Art Fund has produced this ongoing lecture series of presentations and discussions by some of today’s most influential artists, critics, and curators, including Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, Catherine David, Kasper Konig, Okwui Enwezor, and Lynne Cook.
* Panel Discussion
Public Space and Sustainable Development
The Future of an Old City
October 27, 2006 - 6:30 p.m.
As the distinction between commerce and leisure is increasingly blurred, public space has morphed into a structure that is semi-private, semi-governmental and facilitates both commerce and entertainment. Architects, artists and urban historians convene in this panel to consider how sustainable design—with its emphasis on energy conservation, efficiency, environmentally reflexive material specification etc.—has been deployed in contemporary public space through developers’ initiatives and government subsidies. What claims does the city stake on these new sites by fiscally supporting such developments? What is the client’s agenda in financing them? How does the public interact with spaces whose infrastructure is intrinsically linked to that of the larger community? Is that interdependency reflected in people’s interaction with each other?
Moderator:
Joel Towers, Associate Provost for Environmental Studies, Director, Tishman Environment and Design Center, The New School
Panelists:
Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, WORKac, New York
John Krieble, Director, Office of Sustainable Design, City of New York Department of Design and Construction
Victoria Marshall, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, Urban Design Program
Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Associate Professor, Parsons The New School of Design
Co-organized with The Tishman Environment and Design Center and the Humanities Department at The New School and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at The New School.
* This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
Lecture
“Public Art Fund Talks,” with Sharon Lockhart
November 7, 2006 - 6:30 p.m.
Now in its twelfth year, The Public Art Fund has produced this ongoing lecture series of presentations and discussions by some of today’s most influential artists, critics, and curators, including Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, Catherine David, Kasper Konig, Okwui Enwezor, and Lynne Cook.
Panel Discussion
Can a Photograph Truly Be Original?
Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context
November 8, 2006 - 7:00 p.m.
Photography by its nature is reproductive and bound by the technical limits of the medium. Indeed, some would say that "originality" historically has not been a principal goal of the photographer, and it is an elusive, if not unreachable, goal for artists working today. Yet a unique eye can be found in the work of many photographers. Is “identifiability" the same thing as originality? Does it matter?
Moderator:
Ellen S. Harris, Executive Director, The Aperture Foundation
Panelists:
Charlotte Cotton, Head of Cultural Programs, Art + Commerce
Jody Quon, Director of Photography, New Yorkmagazine
Dan Winters, photographer
This panel is part of the Aperture Foundation Lectures: “Confounding Expectations IV: Photography in Context,” and is presented in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation, Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School with generous support from the Kettering Family Foundation and the Henry Nias Foundation. This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Film Screenings
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours and A Map With Gaps
November 12, 2006 - 4:00 p.m.
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours
Rebecca Baron. 2005. 50 min. (U.K.) NY Premiere
This provocative video essay about surveillance explores the British “mass observation” movement, a social science enterprise founded in the late 1930s in England that combined anthropology with surrealism. The film traces the history of the movement, from its inception as a progressive, if naïve, “anthropology of ourselves” to its reincarnation as a civil spy unit during World War II, and its eventual emergence as a market research firm in the 1950s.
Followed by a discussion with director Rebecca Baron.
A Map with Gaps
Alice Nelson. 2006. 26 min. (Scotland) NY Premiere
Using a combination of archive audio recordings, still photographs, drama reconstruction, and animation, this surreal and comic tale is an account of a journey made by the director’s father through Soviet Russia in the early 1970s in a van he built and named “Supervan.” Truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, and sometimes the gray area between the two is the most interesting place to explore.
* * *
These two films are presented as part of The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. Founded by The American Museum of Natural History in 1977, it is the longest-running showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction.
Lecture
“Public Art Fund Talks,” with Sean Landers
November 21, 2006 - 6:30 p.m.
Now in its twelfth year, The Public Art Fund has produced this ongoing lecture series of presentations and discussions by some of today’s most influential artists, critics, and curators, including Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, Catherine David, Kasper Konig, Okwui Enwezor, and Lynne Cook.
* Panel Discussion
Radio Communities: The Other Side of the Electronic Divide
November 29, 2006 – 6:30 p.m.
Radio creates a broadly accessible dimension in which various communities can meet, exchange, discuss, and develop ideas on their own terms, often free of commercial and governmental constraints and regulations. It is thus transforming the way we think of notions of geography and public place. Since cyberspace and advanced technologies in media have not yet reached all of the developing world, broadcast radio is still the easiest medium for sharing knowledge across borders and in spite of the restraints of time and space—a quality that also informs artistic radio endeavors. As a non-visual medium, radio has also gained additional prominence and validity in politically charged situations, where a certain degree of anonymity is necessary. What political, cultural and humanitarian goals can be served by this medium exclusively? How does radio function as a tool for shared information? This panel discusses the ability of airwaves to keep the world connected near and far, and where other technology fails.
Panelists:
Khin Phyu Htway, student, The New School; Voice of America, Burmese service
William H. Siemering, President, Developing Radio Partners
Pete Tridish, Prometheus Radio Project
Gregory Whitehead, artist
Moderator:
Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, Producer, Outer Voices
* This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
* Panel Discussion
Open Source: On the Line
December 4, 2006 - 6:30 p.m.
Webcast: Part 1; Part 2.
Convening participants across a wide range of professions and experience, this panel will explore the aesthetic and political possibilities afforded by open source systems. A practice that promotes access to a product’s source material (often coded), open source is both a practical approach and a philosophy. Online, it has created a framework for collaborative projects between artists, programmers and all kinds of emerging entrepreneurs. It has also become a flashpoint issue in debates around copyright and intellectual property.
The panelists will examine sites like Wikipedia, Digg.com, as well as p2p networks and social networking sites and the practices and challenges inherent to each. They will also explore artworks, arts institutions and businesses that have sought to adopt open source models, and touch on current challenges to continuation of this ethos such as “net neutrality” legislation.
Panelists:
Cory Arcangel, artist
Joy Garnett, artist
Patrick May, Director of Technology, Rhizome.org
Daniel Mayer, Co-founder, Wikipedia
Laura Quilter, Founder, Fair Use Network
Moderator:
Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, The Whitney Museum of American Art
Organized by Rhizome, in association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
* This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain” and on occasion of Rhizome’s 10th anniversary.
* Panel Discussion
Image Ownership and Usage in the Digital Age
Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context
December 4, 2006 - 7:00 p.m.
This panel explores some of the ins and outs of U.S law pertaining the image ownership in a digital age, from the perspective of a lawyer, estate executor, and stock agency. What constitutes “free use”? How does freedom of expression dovetail with an artist’s protection of his or her work? Are images more available today or less? As a practical matter, how does one enforce copyright law?
Panelists:
Richard Ellis, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Getty Images
Barbara Hoffman, arts, entertainment and intellectual property lawyer
Moderator:
Michelle Bogre: Associate Professor and Chair, Photography Department, Parsons The New School for Design, writer and photographer
This panel is part of the Aperture Foundation Lectures: “Confounding Expectations IV: Photography in Context,” and is presented in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation, Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School with generous support from the Kettering Family Foundation and the Henry Nias Foundation. This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
* This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain”
Celebration
Marcia Tucker Memorial Tribute
January 12, 2007 - 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Webcast: Part 1; Part 2.
A visionary curator without resources or a collection, Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1977 at The New School, at the invitation of philanthropist and New School Trustee Vera List. Tucker’s model for a museum dedicated to exhibiting the work of emerging and under-recognized artists defied conventional practices of the art world at that time, and launched a potent and enduring international model for the exhibition of contemporary art in a museum context. In 1983, the New Museum moved to larger premises in SoHo, and will open its new building on the Bowery in the fall of 2007.
As director of the New Museum from 1977 to 1999, Marcia Tucker organized such polemical exhibitions as “Bad Painting” (1978) and “Bad Girls” (1994), and presided over the first museum exhibitions of John Baldessari, Christian Boltanski, Barry Le Va, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneeman, and David Wojnarowicz. She was also the series editor of Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art, influential books of theory and criticism published by the New Museum.
From 1969 to 1977, Tucker was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she organized solo exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. It was her show of Tuttle’s provocative and minimal work that provoked her departure from the Whitney Museum.
Tucker was the 1999 recipient of the Bard College Award for Curatorial Achievement, and received the ArtTable Award for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts in 2000. She was a dedicated lecturer, teacher and writer. Tucker also led a secret life as stand-up comic Mabel McNeil and her alter ego "Miss Mannerist."
Introduction:Lisa Phillips, Henry Luce III Director, The New Museum of Contemporary Art
Speakers:Susana Torruella Leval, Director Emeritus, El Museo del Barrio
Martin Friedman, former director, The Walker Art Center
John Baldessari, artist
Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty and Senior Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, The School of the Art Institute Chicago
Ned Rifkin, Under Secretary for Art, Smithsonian Institution
Larissa Simpson, student, Brooklyn College
Pat Steir, artist
Music:Sacred Harp Singers
Panel Discussion
Art as Mediation
February 15, 2007 - 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
This panel explores how communications and new media are increasingly employed in the arts to engage, connect, and empower global audiences in times of crisis.
As ruptures from world crises deepen, more people look to alternative models for exchange and mediation. Technological means have recently surfaced in the arts that successfully bridge social, cultural, and political differences. Different disciplines come into play, in questioning, challenging, and experimenting with social and political change. How do artists, curators, and theorists use telecommunications technology proactively? How do peer-to-peer networks, on-line social spaces, and blogs lead to
participation and empowerment? How are artists using electronic systems to reposition the notion of dialogue and to define dialogue as mediation that counters or disrupts stereotypes and dangerous ideologies?
The panel features artists, theorists, writers, thinkers and critics from different backgrounds, and is moderated by artist Randall Packer.
Moderator:
Randall Packer, artist, Assistant Professor, Department of Art, American University, Washington D.C., Secretary-at-Large, U.S. Department of Art & Technology
Panelists:
Steve Dietz, curator and Director, Zero-One, San Jose, CA
Carin Kuoni, curator and Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School
Drazen Pantic, internet activist, Co-Director, Location One, New York
Jon Winet, artist and Professor, University of Iowa
Presented on occasion of the College Art Association’s 95th Annual Conference, and co-sponsored by the
New Media Caucus of CAA.
Panel Discussion
Visualizing Iraqi Politics & Cultures in Iraq and Diaspora
February 16, 2007 - 6:30 p.m.
View a video of this event
In the 1960s and 1970s, Baghdad emerged as a vital cultural center in the Arab world. After the devastation of the Hussein regime, and the developing civil war now, how do Iraqi artists today cope with the daily physical challenges most of us can barely imagine? In conjunction with the exhibition “Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art” at the Center for Book Arts, the exhibition’s curator, Nada Shabout, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas, will lead a panel discussion exploring the issues faced by Iraqi artists in the Iraq and here. In particular, the panelists will explore the proliferation of the book as an art form pursued by contemporary Iraqi artists, the relationship between Islamic manuscripts and contemporary book art, notions of identity and resistance to the erasure of identity, and the experience of exile. “Dafatir” (which translates as “notebooks” in Arabic) will introduce to New York the work of fifteen Iraqi book artists, some of whom still live and work in Iraq.
A leading authority on Iraqi contemporary art and a consultant to the U.S. Department of State’s Cultural Antiquities Task Force, the Iraq-born Nada Shabout will moderate the discussion with Hashim al-Tawil, Professor of Art History at Henry Ford Community College and Lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture and Arab Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Sharokin Betgevargiz, a lecturer in History of Graphic Design at Central Connecticut State University whose artistic work documents historic and contemporary photos and text in English and in Assyrian, and Michael Rakowitz, Associate Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University whose Iraqi Jewish family was exiled from Iraq in 1946.
Moderator:
Nada Shabout, exhibition curator, “Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art”; Assistant Professor of Art History, The University of North Texas; consultant to the U.S. Department of State’s Cultural Antiquities Task Force
Panelists:
Hashim al-Tawil, Professor of Art History, Henry Ford Community College, Lecturer in
Islamic Art and Architecture and in Arab Studies, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Sharokin Betgevargiz, artist, Lecturer in History of Graphic Design, Central Connecticut State University
Michael Rakowitz, artist, Associate Professor in Art Theory and Practice, Northwestern University
Ella Shohat, Professor in departments of Art, Public Policy, and Middle Eastern Studies, New York University
Presented on occasion of the exhibition “Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art”at the Center for Book Arts (located at 28 West 27th Street) from January to March 2007. The panel discussion is organized by the Center for Book Arts in association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
Panel Discussion
Confounding Expectations V: Photography in Context
Behind the Faces of Fashion
February 21, 2007 - 7:00 p.m.
View a video of this event
This lively panel discussion brings together preeminent representatives from various facets of the fashion industry to discuss fashion photography today, with particular attention to the ways that fashion photography and art collide. The panel coincides with the exhibition Face of Fashion, currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the copublication of the accompanying book by Aperture.
Moderator:
Tim Gunn, chair of fashion design, Parsons The New School for Design
Panelists:
Vince Aletti, writer, critic, and contributor to Face of Fashion
Pascal Dangin, CEO of Box Ltd
Steven Sebring, photographer and director
This panel is part of the Aperture Foundation Lectures: “Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context”, and is presented in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation, Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School with generous support from the Kettering Family Foundation and the Henry Nias Foundation. This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Panel Discussion
Position: Taking Sides in Conflict Photography Today
February 23, 2007 - 6:30 p.m.
Issa Freij and Alexandra Boulat
When we look at photographs published in a magazine or newspaper, does the public ever consider who took the picture or why the photographer was there? The backstory to how and why an image gets made and then published is not necessarily part of the caption or the story that accompanies it. Often, we learn these stories years after pictures have become famous or controversial such as Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in 1945. What do viewers think when they see only one side of a conflict being covered by a photographer? Who decides where a photographer is positioned and why do some photographers seem to be all over the place? During this panel discussion, we will have a chance to see work from photojournalists who live and work in conflict areas such as Palestine and Israel as well as view a short film on the making of the wall in the West Bank of the Israel/Palestine conflict area. We will examine the difficulty of interpreting both sides of an emotional story.
Moderator:
Alison Morley, photo editor and Chair, Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, The International Center of Photography
Panelists:
Alexandra Boulat, photojournalist, VII
Michael Robinson Chavez, photojournalist, The Washington Post
Issa Freij, filmmaker and CBS cameraman
Heidi Levine, photographer, Sipa Press
Shaul Schwarz, photographer, Getty Images
Staged Reading
Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954 - 003064
March 11, 2007, - 4:00 to 9:00 p.m.
A public reading of transcripts selected from the 558 Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the U.S. military prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005.
Video stills of staged reading
The five hour reading will feature approximately 110 pages of tribunal transcripts—a small fraction of the total—as a gesture of making these tribunals public, with all their fabrications, inconsistencies, and contradictions. It will be recorded live and will become part of a collaborative project called Scripts by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander and David Thorne, the 2006/2007 Vera List Center Fellows at The New School.
Featuring multiple media, Scripts responds to the new questions and changed conditions that have arisen since March 2003. The project,of which this reading is just one element, considers the processes by which we become, are placed into and/or refuse to be certain kinds of “individuals”—artists, soldiers, students, journalists, prisoners, detainees, citizens, Iraqis, Europeans, Americans, and so on. The entire project will be exhibited at “Documenta12” in Kassel/Germany.
The Combatant Status Review Tribunals:
After the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that prisoners held at Guantánamo had certain minimal rights, the Department of Defense set up The Combatant Status Review Tribunals, or CSRTs as they are known. The tribunals were additionally designed by the Department of Defense to address Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions and to create a forum for detainees to contest their status as “enemy combatants.” During each tribunal, the U.S. government presents unclassified accusations against the detainee, and the accused is then permitted to rebut these specific charges. The detainee is given personal representation but not standard legal counsel; he is not allowed to see, and therefore rebut, classified information, and since usually the bulk of the evidence that provides the basis for “enemy combatant” designation is classified, prisoners are effectively kept from making their cases.
Readers:
Kyle de Camp
Kouross Esmaeli
Patricia Hoffbauer
Dan Hurlin
Jesal Kapadia
Lloyd Porter
George Sanchez
Suhail Shadoud
Reading
Reading Lebanon
March 22, 2007 - 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Featuring writers, filmmakers, and academics reading selections from Lebanese writing or writing that inspires thought on the recent wars in Lebanon. The event is part of the “Focus on Lebanon” series, a cultural intervention that highlights the work of Lebanon’s culture workers who have struggled to document and convey the cost of war and displacement on their communities.
Participants:
Elias Khoury, Lebanese novelist, playwright and journalist, NYU Global Distinguished Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies. The English translation of his novel Gate of the Sun was named a New York Times notable book in 2005; the paperback edition is being published by Picador in March 2007.
Sinan Antoon, Iraqi-American poet, novelist and filmmaker; Assistant Professor, New York University
Mariam Said, Lebanese-American intellectual active in supporting Middle Eastern cultural and intellectual institutions
Sherene Seikaly, Senior Editor, Arab Studies Journal; doctoral candidate in the Dept. of Middle East & Islamic Studies and Dept. of History at New York University.
Anne Waldman, poet; Professor of Poetics, Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado
This event is organized by the Kevorkian Center, New York University, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and presented on occasion of the “Focus on Lebanon” series.
Panel Discussion
Confounding Expectations V: Photography in Context
Woman, War and Photography: A Tribute to Catherine Leroy
March 28, 2007 - 7:00 p.m.
The Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context series continues with a panel discussion and tribute to Catherine Leroy. Leroy was twenty-one years old when she set out from her native France to Vietnam in 1966. The following year she became the only journalist to partake in a combat jump, and in less than two years, her intrepid reporting made her one of the war’s most published photographers. Later she was wounded with a marine unit in the demilitarized zone. Leroy was captures by the North Vietnamese Army during the Tet offensive but managed to talk her way free. The first female recipient of the Robert Capa Award, and the recipient of many others, Leroy’s gritty, tough images have been published worldwide and stand as a monument to war reporting. This panel is intended as a tribute, and a way of exploring the changing nature of war photography. Leroy died last year shortly after publishing a new book in collaboration with many writers and photographers who also covered the Vietnam War, entitled Under Fire.
Fred Ritchin, of Pixel Press, will be delivering a 10 minute introduction about Catherine Leroy’s life and work.
Moderator:
Robert Pledge, President of Contact Press Images
Panelists:
Lynsey Addario, photojournalist
Samantha Appleton, photojournalist
David Burnett, photojournalist
Carolyn Cole, photojournalist
Carol Guzy, photojournalist
Lecture
“Public Art Fund Talks at The New School,” with Alex Katz
April 4, 2007 - 6:30 p.m.
Webcast
In 1977, Alex Katz created a monumental frieze featuring multistory headshots of glamorous women on the wraparound advertising space of a building at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in Times Square. It happened to be one of the very first projects of the Public Art Fund, which was founded that same year, and was also the first time that Katz had created a work on such a heroic scale; he later described it as "one of the big kicks" of his life. One of the most influential painters of our time, Katz came onto the New York art scene in the late 1950s, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and his iconic style of painting took that movement's monumental proportions and flat surfaces into uncharted, representational territory. Characterized by reductive imagery and rich hues, Katz's vibrant canvases employ the most economic means to lovingly portray the people and places in his life, from Maine seascapes to New York cocktail parties, from portraits of poets and artists to his most famous subject, his wife, Ada. Interested in the gestures and colors that characterize a fleeting moment, Katz has said, "I'm just trying to see the world I live in, not the world that someone else lived in, to get into the present tense and see where I am."
Now in its thirteenth year, The Public Art Fund has produced this ongoing lecture series of presentations and discussions by some of today’s most influential artists, critics, and curators, including Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, Catherine David, Kasper Konig, Okwui Enwezor, and Lynne Cook.
Panel Discussion
High Times, Hard Times: Painting and Politics in New York City, 1967-1975
April 10, 2007 - 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
A panel discussion on issues of politics, race, and feminism in the art world as they emerged during the mid-‘60s when, influenced by social change and the burning political issues of the day, artists such as Jo Baer, Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, and Richard Tuttle created works of great joy, passion, fury, and imagination, expanding conventional concepts of what “painting” could mean. The panel will look at the repercussions today of that historical moment of exuberance, when painting escaped the confines of a prescriptive modernism forty years ago.
Moderator:
Katy Siegel, Associate Professor of Art History and Criticism at Hunter College, CUNY, senior critic, Yale University School of Art, contributing editor of Artforum and curator of the exhibition “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975.”
Panelists:
Anna Chave, Professor of Art History at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Robert Pincus-Witten, art historian, critic, and Professor Emeritus at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Howardena Pindell, artist, curator, writer, and Professor at Stony Brook, State University of New York
Jack Whitten, artist whose work is featured in the exhibition
The panel discussion is organized by Independent Curators International (iCI), the National Academy Museum, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Presented on the occasion of the exhibition “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975
,” organized by iCI, and on view at the National Academy Museum.
* Panel Discussion
Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere
April 13, 2007 - 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
View a video of this event
(top) Carin Kuoni, Director, VLC
(bottom) Panelist Ethan Zuckerman
Over the past ten years the public sphere has been dramatically expanded by participatory web-based technologies. The speakers at this panel will argue for the potential of sociable media such as weblogs and social networking sites to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation. They will focus on various arguments for and against this central claim by examining present-day understandings of the public sphere, ranging from theorists such as Jurgen Habermas and Alexander Kluge to Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler.
Danah Boyd will argue four points: 1) Networked publics are changing the way public life is organized. 2) Our understanding of public/private is being radically altered 3) Participation in public life is critical to the functioning of democracy. 4) We have destroyed youths' access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?
Trebor Scholz will talk about the paradox of affective immaterial labor. Last year, content generated by networked publics created the ten sites on the World Wide Web with most Internet traffic. Community is commodity: very few get rich through the immaterial labor of very many. Net publics share their life experiences and archive their memories while context-providing businesses gain value from the public’s attention, time, and uploaded content. Scholz will argue against what he calls a "factory without walls," and will demand that net publics control their own contributions.
Ethan Zuckerman will present his work on media and the developing world, and the issues related to the technical, legal, speech, and digital divide. After a critique of cyberutopianism, Zuckerman will address in particular citizen media and activism in developing nations, their potential for democratic change, and the ways that governments (and sometimes corporations) are pushing back on their ability to democratize.
Speakers:
Danah Boyd, School of Information, The University of California-Berkeley, Graduate Fellow, The Annenberg Center for Communications, University of Southern California
Trebor Scholz, media theorist, artist, and activist, founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC)
Ethan Zuckerman, Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, founder of Geekcorps
* This event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
* Panel Discussion
ReForming India – Artistic Collectives Bend International Art Practices
April 16, 2007 - 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
India’s economic boom has dazzled investors and captivated the world. But beyond the gleam of computer industries lie corruption, environmental waste, and an elite that struggles with the socialist legacy. What are the challenges and opportunities for cultural projects in a climate of economic expectations and sociopolitical contradictions? What relevance does the public domain have within the cultural discourse and artistic practice in this area of the world?
The panel discussion examines various forms of artist-driven, interdisciplinary collectives in India that have developed as antidotes to the few official contemporary art institutions, which are largely inaccessible to young artists and thus a dysfunctional part of the public sphere. Facing a lack of institutional infrastructure, these collectives have given rise to participatory and interdisciplinary platforms that have spread from India throughout the world, involving artists, curators, researchers, activists or new media workers. In the absence of local funding, the collectives are assuming a quasi-institutional status that often extends their activities internationally, either for fundraising, research or artistic purposes. The results are institutions that feed internationally, in order to navigate the conditions on the ground, in a disembodied form of the public sphere. Among the subjects these institutions tackle are urban development (PUKAR or crit in Mumbai, Sarai in Delhi), artistic workshops and residencies (Khoj in Delhi), local socio-political developments (Open Circle in Mumbai) or the societal role of new media (also Sarai/Raqs).
Moderator:
Nina Moentmann, curator and critic, Hamburg
Panelists:
Jaishri Abichandani, artist and curator, founder of South Asian Women’s Creative Collective
Madhusree Dutta, filmmaker
Vyjayanthi Rao, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, The New School
* This event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
Lecture
“Public Art Fund Talks at The New School,” with Charles Ray
April 18, 2007 - 6:30 p.m.
For more than three decades, Charles Ray's wide-ranging art has continually entertained viewers and upended expectations. With a lively, self-deprecating sense of humor and virtuoso craftsmanship, the Los Angeles-based artist depicts familiar elements of everyday life and modern art in disarmingly altered ways. His abstract and figurative sculptures—many of them among the most iconic artworks of our time—are the result of "some everyday thought that sticks," as he puts it. From his black ink-filled minimalist cube to his elaborate cast-aluminum sculpture of an abandoned piece of work equipment, Untitled (Tractor) (2003-05), Ray's boisterous works cause shifts in perception and address sculpture's most fundamental questions: mass, space, color, and gravity. Interested in the active processes that are happening when one looks at art, Ray's work encourages viewers to focus not just on subject matter, but also on how a sculpture occupies and shapes its surroundings. Toy Truck (1993), a Tonka fire truck scaled up to the size of the actual thing was the show-stopping icon of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Parked in front of the museum, its one-to-one scale with the city suggested that perhaps everything else around it was a toy version of itself, too.
Now in its thirteenth year, The Public Art Fund has produced this ongoing lecture series of presentations and discussions by some of today’s most influential artists, critics, and curators, including Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, Catherine David, Kasper Konig, Okwui Enwezor, and Lynne Cook.
Film Screening and Discussion
Academy Award-nominated “My Country, My Country” (2006)
Featuring filmmaker Laura Poitras in conversation with Peter Davis
May 1, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
“My Country, My Country” follows the agonizing predicament and gradual descent of one man caught in the tragic contradictions of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its project to “spread democracy” in the Middle East. Director Laura Poitras follows events leading up to the January 2005 Iraqi elections in a dramatic story that unfolds through the eyes of Dr. Riyadh, a medical doctor, devout Sunni Muslim, father of six, and Sunni political candidate.
“The definitive film about the U.S. occupation of Iraq…. It is indispensable, heartbreaking, and ferociously wise.” – The Village Voice
Speakers:
Laura Poitras, filmmaker “My Country, My Country”
Peter Davis, filmmaker and Artist-in-Residence, The Department of Media Studies and Film, The New School
* * *
Laura Poitras studied filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Media Studies and Film Program at The New School. She is the director, cinematographer, and producer of “My Country, My Country.” She was co-director, cinematographer, and producer of “Flag Wars” (2003), which received a Peabody Award and was nominated for both an Emmy and an Independent Spirit Award.
Best known for “Hearts and Minds” (1975), an Academy Award-winning documentary on the Vietnam War, Peter Davis has had a long and distinguished career as a journalist and filmmaker unafraid to court controversy and tackle American politics in its many dimensions. Familiar to many readers today for his ongoing coverage of the Iraq war in The Nation, Davis has, over the years, contributed articles to such diverse publications asEsquire magazine, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. Davis’ groundbreaking work in television journalism and documentary filmmaking include such highly acclaimed series as “Middletown” and “The Selling of the Pentagon”.
Presented by The New School’s Department of Media Studies and Film in association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Lecture
“Public Art Fund Talks at The New School,” with Lisa Yuskavage
May 3, 2007 - 6:30 p.m.
Brash, sensual, monstrous and lovely—sometimes all at once—Lisa Yuskavage's paintings and drawings have enchanted and startled viewers since her first New York solo show in 1993. Known for her extreme and provocative depictions of women, Yuskavage creates virtuoso, jewel-tone paintings that blend high and low aesthetic influences. She has recently turned in a more complex psychological direction with a series of investigations of symbiotic relationships, which strike a delicate balance between tenderness and violence, and between the sacred and the profane. Her exaggerated figures of the 1990s have evolved into the contemplative protagonist of the painting Persimmons, lost in thought amidst a sunny still life of flowers and ripe fruit, or the two figures in Imprint (2006), who seem to meld into one another. Acknowledging the influence of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and other classical works depicting passionate struggles between two people, Yuskavage's quiet power plays take place against dreamy sfumato backdrops or within cozy, close-color interiors.
Now in its thirteenth year, The Public Art Fund has produced this ongoing lecture series of presentations and discussions by some of today’s most influential artists, critics, and curators, including Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, Catherine David, Kasper Konig, Okwui Enwezor, and Lynne Cook.
Lecture
Confounding Expectations V: Photography in Context
Gilbert & George
May 9, 2007 - 7:00 p.m.
View a video of this event
Legendary British duo Gilbert & George will discuss their remarkable artistic and personal collaboration over the last thirty-five years, from their early performance pie