WJT Mitchell: Dec 11

W.J.T. Mitchell: The Future of the Image
Thursday, December 11, 7pm
SVA, 209 East 23 Street, 3rd-floor amphitheater

Scholar and theorist of media, art and literature W.J.T. Mitchell will discuss the work of Jacques Ranciere, a contemporary French philosopher whose writings on the relationship between contemporary art and politics have garnered much attention in the art world. Mitchell is a well-known figure in the fields of visual culture and iconology, a professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago and the editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry. 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=2671

Situated Technologies:The Colloquy of Things

Philip Beesley, Marc Böhlen, and Natalie Jeremijenko.
Moderated by Omar Khan
Thursday, December 11, 7pm
The Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue

A panel discussion organized in conjunction with the Situated Technologies Pamphlets Series, the League's ongoing publication series exploring the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. The panel will explore the growing agency of natural and artificial "things," considering themes such as ambient intelligence, underspecification, responsiveness, and emergent ecologies. Free for League members; $10 non-members. To reserve or purchase tickets, or for more information, click here.

The third Situated Technologies pamphlet, Situated Advocacy, is currently available print-on-demand from Lulu.com. This special double issue features the essays "Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy," by Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey, and "Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces," by Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko. See website for more info: http://www.archleague.org/index-dynamic.php?show=828

Karen Finley: Nov 25

Karen Finley
RAPID RESPONSE: I NEED MY SPACE
Tuesday, November 25, 6:30 pm
Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610

Visual and performance artist Karen Finley will lead this group meeting, featuring invited and volunteer testimonials sharing our emotional responses to the election and the various needs for space--physical, social, cultural and psychological--that it exposed. How do our national political relationships inform or dialogue with the workplace, family, community and friends? How do the race, gender, class and identity issues raised in the campaign continue to be discussed? Finley will also address the transformation of the memory of Chicago's Grant Park (and the 1968 Democratic Convention) from a site of pain and loss into one of celebration and unity on November 4th, as well as legacies of Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights Movement embodied in that space.

Audience participation in the meeting is encouraged. I NEED MY SPACE will last approximately one hour, with the hope of providing a therapeutic and supportive group environment for those needing space in their own lives.

Free and open to the public. RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Refreshments provided by BAREFOOT WINES

RAPID RESPONSE is held on the last Tuesday of each month, it is an open and undetermined platform for quick response to events that have taken place over the last thirty days. Studio-X is a downtown studio for experimental design and research run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. http://www.arch.columbia.edu/studiox/calendar.html

Howard Gardner: Nov 25, Dec 2+9

The True, the Beautiful, and the Good:
Reconsiderations in a Postmodern, Digital Era
Museum of Modern Art, Titus Theater 1

Tuesday, November 25, 6:30 p.m.
Kinds and Degrees of Truths.
Moderated by Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor in the History of Science and Physics, Harvard University

Tuesday, December 2, 6:30 p.m.
Beauty and Its Successors.
Moderated by Paola Antonelli, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Tuesday, December 9, 6:30 p.m.
The Good: Seen through the Prisms of Biology, Culture, and History.
Moderated by Antonio Damasio, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, and Director, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

In this unprecedented lecture series, world-renowned psychologist Howard Gardner offers an extended reflection on the concepts of Truth, Beauty, and the Good in a postmodern, digital age. Drawing from philosophy, history, natural sciences, and cultural theory, Gardner analyzes how a sophisticated understanding of the power and limitations of these concepts can come about; and how best to understand what is essential, expendable, or deceptive about truth, beauty, goodness, and their opposites. ($10/$8/$5)

http://www.moma.org/calendar/events.php?id=10171&ref=calendar

Shirazeh Houshiary: Nov 25

Shirazeh Houshiary
Tuesday, November 25, 6:30 p.m.
Guggenheim Museum

Guided by the mystical traditions of Sufism, Shirazeh Houshiary's practice challenges the boundaries of perception and reality with drawings and paintings characterized by layers of fine marks as well as sculptures and installations that evoke biomorphic, abstract forms based on mathematical calculation. $10 ($7 for members and students)

http://www.guggenheim.org/education/tours_lectures.shtml#category_10

Jonas Bendiksen: Nov 24

Monday, November 24, 6:30 pm
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street,4th fl

Magnum Photographer Jonas Bendiksen will be in conversation with prominent author and editor of the Paris Review Philip Gourevitch about Bendiksen’s latest book The Places We Live (Aperture, 2008), a unique and powerful portrait of slum life today introduced by Gourevitch.
http://www.aperture.org/events/

You can also listen to the live webcast here: http://www.aperture.org/live/

John Baldessari: Nov 20

The Walter Annenberg Annual Lecture
John Baldessari
Thursday, November 20, 7 pm
Whitney Museum of American Art

In honor of the late Walter H. Annenberg, philanthropist, patron of the arts, and former ambassador, the Whitney Museum of American Art established the Walter Annenberg Annual Lecture to advance this country's understanding of its art and culture. In this fourth Annenberg Lecture, John Baldessari will speak about his work in conversation with Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney's Alice Pratt Brown Director. For more than fifty years, Baldessari has masterfully juxtaposed painting, photography, sculpture, and other media to probe how meaning is created through images, objects, and text.

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

Matthew Higgs and Elizabeth Peyton: Nov 20

Matthew Higgs and Elizabeth Peyton: 20 Questions
Friday, Nov 21, 7:30 pm
New Museum, 235 Bowery

Artist, curator, and director of White Columns Matthew Higgs will interview the artist Elizabeth Peyton using a list of questions contributed by twenty artists, curators, critics, and others who are familiar with Peyton's work.

From her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, and Marc Jacobs, Elizabeth Peyton's body of work presents a chronicle of America at the end of the last century. A painter of modern life, Peyton's small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and even personal. Together, her works capture an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

http://www.newmuseum.org/events/266

Tercerunquinto: Nov 19

Panel Discussion: Tercerunquinto
Wednesday, November 19, 6:30 p.m.
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue

Panelists include Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares, and Rolando Flores from Tercerunquinto, as well as Eungie Joo, Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs at the New Museum, and Taiyana Pimentel, Independent Curator, Mexico City.

Tercerunquinto is a collective formed by Castro, Cázares and Flores that jointly manipulate architectural elements to change the spatial dynamics of interior and exterior spaces, in order to examine their limits and to alter their functions. The artists will discuss their work with Joo and Pimentel. This event is free and open to the public. In collaboration with the Mexican Cultural Institute. This program is part of the 3rd Annual Latin American Culture Week in New York City. For more information visit www.pamar.org/lacwnyc/

http://as.americas-society.org/calevent.php?id=394

Catherine Sullivan: Nov 19

Wednesday, November 19, 6:30pm
The New School
John Tishman Auditorium / 66 West 12th Street

Catherine Sullivan's installations combine theater, dance, film, music and visual art; through these disciplines she scrutinzes collective audiences such as nostalgia, the sensations of history, and cultural acquiescence. The performers in her pieces often explore written texts, stylistic economies, gestural regimes, reenactments of history and conceptual orthodoxies. Her work is usually shot or performed within locations that are richly layered with social functions, and the elements of character, action and setting play off one another to produce an anxious and unresolved political sensibility. The topics touched upon in Sullivan's 2007 piece, Triangle of Need, are numerous and varied, including Neanderthal orphans, Nigerian email scams and even time travel. To create this piece, the artist collaborated with noted music, dance and film professionals, to create an ambitious and thought-provoking work that makes underlying comments on a broader set of issues. However, her true medium is the ensemble itself, and her works most often involve multiple collaborators. With The Chittendens (2005), for example, a six-channel sound and video piece produced in collaboration with composer Sean Griffin, Sullivan assigned sixteen actors different "attitudes" — each characterized by appointed movements and emotions that were performed according to a strict pattern. The name of the piece itself was derived from an insurance agency called "Chittenden Group" whose logo — a lighthouse — is a meaningful metaphor for self-possession.

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