Anthony McCall: April 30

Anthony McCall
Thursday, April 30, 7pm
Whitney Museum

A hybrid of performance, sculpture, and experimental cinema, Anthony McCall’s “solid light” film projections occupy a room through the interplay of light, fog, mist, and shadows. His installations engage viewers as active participants while challenging our perceptions of volume, space, and objecthood. In tonight's program, McCall addresses how his interactive cinematic environments transform the physical and conceptual space between film and its audiences. $6/8

http://www.whitney.org/www/educational_programs/public_programs.jsp#seminars

Jonathan Torgovnik: April 29

Jonathan Torgovnik
Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape
Panel Discussion: April 29, 6:30 pm
Aperture Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor

Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape brings together Jonathan Torgovnik’s powerful documentation of the accounts of women who were subjected to massive sexual violence by members of Hutu militia groups during the 1994 genocide. An estimated twenty thousand children were born as a result of rapes that occurred during the Rwandan genocide and fifteen years later, the mothers of these children still face enormous challenges. Aperture Foundation presents a panel discussion on this topic, coinciding with the exhibition now on view at Aperture Gallery, and the release of the accompanying book. This event will feature a reading of the testimonies by Rwandan women, as well as multimedia interviews produced by MediaStorm with the women portrayed in the exhibition and a discussion with Melissa Robinson, director of Educational Programming of the non-profit organization Kids for Tomorrow, Carl Auerbach, Professor of Psychology at Yeshiva University and the photographer Jonathan Torgovnik, who is also co-founder of Foundation Rwanda.

http://www.aperture.org/gallery/

Christian Jankowski: April 29

Christian Jankowski
Wednesday, April 29, 6:30pm
The New School
John Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street

German artist Christian Jankowski works in a variety of media including video, installation, performance, photography and sculpture, often confounding reality and fiction, while typically engaging the subjects of his works in the creative process. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with a diverse variety of characters, often humorous, all of whom have appeared in his work. In 1997, Jankowski consulted a therapist about his "creative block", and produced a video piece from the ensuing therapy sessions called Desperately Seeking Artwork. His piece Telemistica was created for the Venice Biennale in 1999 when Jankowski called Italian fortunetellers on their live television shows and asked them questions about his artwork. Their responses and prophesies were video-taped and became the content of the work of art. In these two cases, as in others, the artist's work ends up being about its own creation. Currently, Public Art Fund is presenting Jankowski's Living Sculptures at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park; a trio of life-sized, bronze figures modeled after three professional street performers the artist observed and selected in Barcelona who regularly present themselves as the likenesses of a Roman legionnaire referred to as "Caesar", the revolutionary leader Che Guevara, and an enigmatic woman inspired by Salvador Dali's figure known as "The Anthropomorphic Cabinet Woman." The human scale and figurative representation of the sculptures beckon viewers to come closer, consider whether they are real street performers or statues, pose next to them for photos, and perhaps even leave a few coins in appreciation.

http://www.publicartfund.org/pafweb/talks/talks_current.htm

Julieta Aranda: April 29

Julieta Aranda
Wednesday, April 29, 6:30 pm
Guggenheim

Within her multimedia oeuvre, Julieta Aranda (b. 1975, Mexico City) has frequently focused on the dissemination of information and the agency of the individual in contemporary society, reinventing existing systems of commerce and circulation to generate “alternative transactions of cultural capital.” Aranda inaugurates Intervals, a new experimental program devoted to the work of emerging artists, with a site-specific installation that activates unlikely spaces within the museum’s rotunda.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/adult-and-academic-programs/public-programs

Thomas Y. Levin: April 29

Thomas Y. Levin
Wednesday, April 29, 3:15-5:15
Parsons, 66 Fifth Ave. Kellen Auditorium

Thomas Y. Levin is a Professor in the Department of German at Princeton University. He specializes in media and cultural theory, the Frankfurt School, art history, acoustics and technics. Levin was chosen by the Dutch Ministry of Culture to be "artist-in-residence" at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. He has curated "CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother," a major international exhibition which was on view at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. In November 2005, he organized a one-day conference at the Louvre Museum in Paris entitled "Photographie, Prison, Pouvoir: Politiques de l'Image Carcérale" which re-examined the history of the "carceral image" in the wake of Abu Ghraib. Levin is currently writing a book about the film-theoretical cinema of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.

http://www.parsons.newschool.edu/events/event_detail.aspx?eID=1039

Islands and Ghettos: April 28

Islands and Ghettos
Tuesday, April 28, 6:30pm
Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610

With the extreme examples of Caracas and Dubai as a starting point, ISLAND + GHETTOS examines phenomena of territorial segregation in a global context. Currently on display at Berlin's NGBK Gallery, the work featured within this exhibition and accompanying publication will be discussed at Studio-X by:

Frederic Levrat , Columbia University GSAPP
Alfredo Brillembourg, Urban Think Tank, Columbia University GSAPP
Hubert Klumpner, Urban Think Tank, Columbia University GSAPP

Response by Pedro Rivera

Alongside three simultaneous slide shows of islands, ghettos, enclaves and global polar extremes. Free and open to the public. RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu

Scrapbooks and Self Works: April 28

Scrapbooks and Self Works: Jessica Helfand and Rebecca Melvin
Tuesday, April 28, 6:30pm
Cooper Hewitt

Combining pictures, words and a wealth of personal ephemera, scrapbook makers preserve on the pages of their books a moment, a day, or a lifetime. Join Jessica Helfand, graphic designer, co-editor of Design Observer, and author of Scrapbooks: An American History, and Rebecca Melvin, manuscripts librarian and curator of Self Works: Diaries, Scrapbooks, and Other Autobiographical Efforts, for a presentation and conversation about this lively art and its history. $15/10

http://events.cooperhewitt.org/?date=2009-04

Conceptual Writing + The Flarf Collective: April 17

An Evening of Contemporary Poetry:
Conceptual Writing and The Flarf Collective
Friday, April 17, 7 pm
Whitney Museum

Conceived and organized by poet Kenneth Goldsmith on the occasion of the exhibition Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT

This reading presents eight writers associated with two cutting-edge movements in contemporary poetry: Conceptual Writing and The Flarf Collective. The followers of both movements employ technology to write their works, often using strategies familiar to the visual arts: appropriation, falsification, insincerity, and plagiarism. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between the pages of a book and it continually morphs from the printed page to the webpage, from the gallery space to the science lab, from the social space of the poetry reading to social space of the blog. It is a poetics of flux, one that celebrates instability and uncertainty.

Featured poets: Christian Bök, Nada Gordon, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Kim Rosenfield, Gary Sullivan, Darren Wershler

This event is free with Museum Admission, which is pay-what-you-wish during Whitney After Hours on Fridays from 6-9 pm. Advance reservations are recommended, as space is limited. Tickets may be reserved at the Museum Admissions desk or online at whitney.org. Inquiries: public_programs@whitney.org or (212) 570-7715.

http://www.whitney.org/www/educational_programs/public_programs.jsp#seminars

Art Mag Night: April 15

Art Mag Night
Wednesday, April 15, 7-10pm
Book Court
163 Court St, Brooklyn

A party, readings, and presentation featuring writers from Bidoun, Cabinet, Pin-Up and Paper Monument! Naomi Fry, Jessica Slaven, and Roger White of Paper Monument will be reading to the people! Come and see! And hear!

http://www.bookcourt.org/?cat=1/

Thomas Demand: April 15

Thomas Demand
Fiction, Fact & Fabrication
Wednesday, April 15, 6:30- 8:30
Columbia University GSAPP
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall

http://beta.arch.columbia.edu/event/gsapp-event/fiction-fact-fabrication

Emily Jacir: April 14

Emily Jacir
Wednesday, April 15, 3:15- 5:15pm
Parsons, 66 Fifth Ave. Kellen Auditorium

Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist who was born in Baghdad in Iraq. Jacir spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia and Italy. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Dallas and her MFA from the Memphis College of Art. Currently, she divides her time between New York and her hometown of Ramallah. Jacir works in a variety of media including film, photography, installation, performance, video, writing and sound. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe and the Middle East since 1994. She has been active in building Ramallah’s art scene since 1999 and has been involved in various organizations including the Qattan Foundation, al-Ma’mal Foundation and the Sakakini Cultural Center. She is currently a full-time instructor at the International Academy of Art in Ramallah. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Prince Claus Award and a 2008 finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize.

http://www.parsons.newschool.edu/events/event_detail.aspx?eID=1037

Carlos Motta Carin Kuoni, and Susan Meiselas: April 11

Carlos Motta, Carin Kuoni, and Susan Meiselas
Saturday, April 11, 4-6pm
Smack Mellon Gallery
92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn

Carin Kuoni will moderate as the panel examines the "documentary" aspect of The Good Life, in particular: the methodology/techniques Carlos Motta employed to construct multiple layers of public discourse; the projects relationship to journalism and how news organizations do and don’t fashion reality (and public opinion) through documentary; the piece’s usefulness and validity as an ethnographic tool; and the projects place as a sociological investigation of world cultures both in relation to one another and to the United States and the kind of knowledge such an investigation produces from within an art discourse.

One of the major goals in organizing the panel is to involve audiences in critical thinking and discussion about the piece and how both the artistic techniques and appropriation of other forms not often used in traditional art making impact the work, audience reaction to the work and the potential long term effects of the piece on public discourse around issues of democracy, leadership, etc.

The panel will also explore the way the piece may or may not be an archive of histories and stories reflecting US foreign policy and its influence on the peoples living in the southern hemisphere. Ultimately, given the current transition in United States, where we seem to be redefining our foreign policy, is the piece a looking glass moving forward or looking backward? Can and do artistic projects count as a fair record of history?

http://smackmellon.org/theGoodLife.html

Art and Value: April 8

Art and Value
Wednesday, April 8th at 7:00pm
CUE Art Foundation
511 West 25th St

How do we value art? Arts journalism has been quick to respond to the recession with talk of an art market boom turned bust. These responses, though, have mostly told two tales. In one version, recessions are good for art. The art world of the last few years had become increasingly conservative and corporate; now without the pressure of selling their work, artists are free to experiment and without inflated real estate prices, non-commercial spaces can thrive. In the other version, a booming art market wasn't just about hedge-fund collectors and cash-flush auction houses, it also allowed artists to make a living off of their work and provided an unprecedented amount of entry level jobs in the arts. Artists with day jobs are not so free and scaling back the infrastructure surrounding art means less jobs for artists who are not making a living off of their work.

Both of these responses acknowledge a relationship between how we value art economically, as something to be bought and sold, and how we value art culturally, as something we deem meaningful and around which we structure our lives, even if neither response assumes that these two forms of value are concurrent. The question remains, however, what relationship do these very different forms of value have to one and other? Ad Hoc Vox has brought together members from the fields of anthropology, art history, economics, and philosophy to respond to this question.

The discussion participants include Lynn Catterson, Elizabeth Currid, David Graeber, Paul Mattick, and Don Thompson. Colleen Asper will moderate the panel, which will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

www.adhocvox.org

David Joselit: Time Batteries: April 8

Time Batteries
Presented by David Joselit
Wednesday, April 8, 7:30pm
Light Industry
220 36th Street, 5th Floor, Brooklyn
Tickets $7, available at door.

"Data storage is one of our fundamental economic, political and historical challenges. Data is collected from us whenever we click, charge, or swipe—it helps politicians decide who “we” are and what “we” want. Wal-mart knows how to use it to sell us things and Obama knows how to read it to take the nation’s temperature. But is there an aesthetics of data storage? Now that anybody can record almost anything, can this form of primitive image accumulation be a kind of art?

"'Time Batteries' handle duration differently from classic video works by artists like Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman or Joan Jonas where the dilation of time was tied to the expansion of perception. Duration is now linked to the banal but fundamental ethos of storage. I will test this thesis by presenting two works: Mary Ellen Carroll’s film “Alas poor YORICK!” (2008) in which the artist’s drawing made from her hand transcription of the entire text of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy on a single sheet is burned on a beach in Truro, and Rachel Harrison’s “Roman Holiday,” a found moment of slapstick recorded from a restaurant table in Rome. I’ll discuss questions of media transfer and consumption (in fire, in boredom, and even of products) as manifest in these works, and I’ll draw a historical genealogy for a possible aesthetics of data storage." - DJ

http://www.lightindustry.org

R.H. Quaytman: April 8

R.H. Quaytman
Wednesday, April 8
3:15-5:15pm
Parsons
66 Fifth Ave. Kellen Auditorium
Ticket Price: Free

R.H. Quaytman is a painter living and working in New York City. She was born in 1961 and received her BA in Painting from Bard College. Subsequent to that she attended the Post-Graduate program in painting at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. In 1989 she was invited to the Institut Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, Paris, France where she studied with Daniel Buren and Pontus Hulton. She was also the recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in 1992. Quaytman was a founding member and director of a cooperative gallery called Orchard. Her work is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery and Vilma Gold Gallery in London. Currently she is working on two upcoming solo exhibitions for those galleries for December 2008. Her book Allegorical Decoys was just published by MER Press and is available at Printed Matter bookstore. She is currently on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

http://www.parsons.newschool.edu/events/event_detail.aspx?eID=1036

Lisa Yuskavage: April 7

Lisa Yuskavage
Tuesday, April 7, 7pm
SVA, 209 East 23 Street, 3rd-floor amphitheater

Lisa Yuskavage, a figurative painter best known for her overtly sexualized female nudes, will discuss works chosen by students for this event. Eleanor Heartney, writing in Art in America, described Yuskavage’s work: “Echoes of Vermeer and Goya jostle against the spirit of calendar pinups and Catholic Kitsch.” Presented by the BFA Fine Arts and BFA Visual and Critical Studies Departments. Free and open to the public

http://www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/events/index.jsp?sid0=70&page_id=181&content_id=2766

Nietzsche Loves You: April 7

Avital Ronell: Nietzsche Loves You
Tuesday, April 7, 7pm
SVA, Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23 Street

Author and educator Avital Ronell will examine the relationships between art and morality, presenting the dossiers of Friedrich Nietzsche, the most ferocious defender of art as a vital necessity. Ronell is a professor at NYU and the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and frequently contributes to ArtForum and ArtUS. Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department. Free and open to the public

http://www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/events/index.jsp?sid0=70&page_id=181&content_id=2765

Marina Abramović: April 7

Marina Abramović—Night Sea Crossing: A Lecture
Tuesday, April 7, 6:30 p.m.
Guggenheim

The celebrated performance artist Marina Abramović discusses the series of twenty-two Night Sea Crossing performances (1981-87) created with her former collaborator, Ulay (Uwe Layesiepen). Created after Ulay and Abramović had returned from a long period in the Australian outback, the performance work consisted of Abramović and Ulay seated in stillness and silence with a Tibetan Buddhist lama and a member of the Pintubi tribe from the Central Australian Desert. $30, $25 members, $10 students under 25.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/adult-and-academic-programs/public-programs

Michael Rock: April 7

Michael Rock
Superficiality: Dematerialization and Branded Surfaces
Tuesday, April 7, 6 - 8pm
SVA, 136 West 21 Street, 2nd floor

Michael Rock is a partner in 2x4, Inc. in New York; director of the Graphic Architecture Project at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; and adjunct professor of design at the Yale School of Art. Working from offices in New York and Beijing, 2x4’s projects range from collaborations with architects, artists and writers to branding for cultural and commercial organizations. Presented by the MFA Design Criticism Department.

Free and open to the public. Please RSVP to 212.592.2228 or dcrit@sva.edu.

http://www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/events/index.jsp?sid0=70&page_id=181&content_id=2840

Guthrie Lonergan: April 6

We Did It Ourselves!
Presented by Guthrie Lonergan
Monday, April 6, 2009 at 7:30pm
Light Industry
220 36th Street, 5th Floor, Brooklyn

Guthrie Lonergan is an Internet and video artist based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at the New Museum and Artists Space in New York and the Sundance Film Festival, and written about in The Wall Street Journal and Rhizome. He is a co-founder of Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club. All of his work is online at http://www.theageofmammals.com.
http://lightindustry.org/

Personal Structures: "Space" Symposium: April 3-4

Personal Structures: Time | Space | Existence:
Two-Day “Space” Symposium at the New Museum

Friday, Apr 3, 3-7pm
and Saturday, April 4, 2-6pm
$6 Members, $8 General Public

The “Space” Symposium is the third in the “Personal Structures Time Space Existence” project. The first symposium, “Time,” was held 2007 in Amsterdam; and the second, “Existence,” 2008 in Tokyo. Dutch curators Sarah Gold and Karlijn De Jongh organized the series.

In this third symposium, basic artistic questions related to space and spatiality will be discussed. On the one hand, “space-relatedness” means the three-dimensional body of the artwork itself or its aesthetic interaction with the actual space in which it is placed. On the other hand, “space-relatedness” means the various notions of space depending on personal, cultural, and social circumstances. These become visible in the artist’s specific choice of his or her means of expression.

Discussion topics include:
- Space and spatiality as themes of nonrepresentational art
- Concepts of space-related painting
- Experience of landscape and urban space structures as artistic inspiration
- Self-perception in space: the experience of space in the reception of nonrepresentational art

See full schedule here: http://www.personalstructures.org/index.php?page=36&lang=en

Natalie Jeremijenko: April 3

Natalie Jeremijenko: Re-Imagining Our Relationship to Natural Systems and Material Culture
Friday, April 3, 6 - 8pm
SVA, 136 West 21 Street, 2nd floor

Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist and experimenter who uses contemporary scientific knowledge and technical resources to redesign socio-ecological systems. She is currently the New York Prize Fellow at Van Alen Institute and directs a network of environmental health clinics. She is an associate professor of visual art at NYU and affiliated faculty in computer science and environmental studies. Her work has been exhibited widely, including venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Presented by the MFA Design Criticism Department.

Free and open to the public. Please RSVP to 212.592.2228 or dcrit@sva.edu.

http://www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/events/index.jsp?sid0=70&page_id=181&content_id=2838

The Brothers Quay: April 2

The Brothers Quay:
The Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-reading Puppets
Thursday, April 2, 6:30pm
Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23 Street
Free and open to the public

A discussion of the film and theater work of stop-motion animators The Brothers Quay, whose feature films include The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes and the upcoming Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Moderated by faculty member Thyrza Goodeve. Presented by the BFA Fine Arts, BFA Visual and Critical Studies, and MFA Art Criticism and Writing Departments.

http://www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/events/index.jsp?sid0=70&page_id=181&content_id=2764