To celebrate the publication of Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 and Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, in this public conversation Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Bernard Geoghegan, and Antonia von Schöning will debate the role of human sciences—as laboratories of administration, modelling, bureaucracy, experimentation, and instrumentation—in the genesis of modern digital cultures. Following initial discussions, the floor will open for interventions and provocations from the public.
On Friday, April 14, 2023, doctoral candidate Pei-Chun Viola Hsieh delivered her talk “Spheres of Indeterminacy: Tactile Politics in Wang Te-yu’s Inflatable Art, circa 1996” at the Symposium on the History of Art, hosted annually by the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and The Frick Collection
“Crossing the Boundaries,” the Art History Graduate Student Union’s annual conference, returns after a one-year hiatus next Friday 21 April in the Kenneth C. Lindsay Study Room of the Binghamton University Art Museum. Featuring recent graduate research, it will also honor the rich work produced under the mentorship of SUNY Distinguished Professor John Tagg, with a panel of alums from around the world speaking to his legacies and their own groundbreaking scholarship. The day concludes with a keynote talk by Siona Wilson, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island-CUNY. All are welcome. A full schedule of events is attached.
The 2022-23 Harpur Dean’s Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Tom McDonough, Professor of Art History. “Black Monument: Ed Wilson Shapes African American History into Public Art, 1972-1984”addresses the public artworks of Ed Wilson, the founder of Harpur College’s studio art program.
Professor McDonough is widely recognized for his work on postwar European avant-gardes, and his collaborations with global contemporary artists. He has also curated exhibitions for the Binghamton University Art Museum, including the 2019 “not but nothing other: African Portrayals, 1930 to Today,” and “Ed Wilson: The Sculptor as Afro-Humanist” that will open to the public in the fall of 2023.
Next week, PhD candidate Lauren Cesiro, will be in conversation with Adam Rosenthal, Collections Director at the Mapplethorpe Foundation, at Suffolk County Community College.
Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action
Book Launch and Discussion at Printed Matter Chelsea
March 30, 2023
6-8pm
Up Against the Real: Black Mask From Art to Action by Nadja Millner-Larsen follows the history of the anti-art group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. The group shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon during an antiwar protest, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after a line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.”
Millner-Larsen will present the book in conversation with professor Tom McDonough, who writes, “In Up Against the Real, Millner-Larsen introduces us to Black Mask, a group of downtown New York anti-art saboteurs who blasted out of the world of experimental painting and cinema and onto the streets, insisting that the abstraction of late modernist painting heralded a new, liberatory, antirepresentational politics. With an acute understanding of the historical and theoretical stakes at play, Millner-Larsen restores their cultural revolution to its rightful place alongside the Situationists, the Young Lords, and other exemplars of ‘60s radicalism.” With an introduction by Lindsay Caplan.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Nadja Millner-Larsen Nadja Millner-Larsen is a visiting assistant professor in the Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program at New York University. Nadja’s writing has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Critical Correspondence, Grey Room, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Art Monthly, Triple Canopy, and various exhibition catalogues. Nadja was an NEH postdoctoral scholar at the Getty Research Institute and a Helena Rubinstein fellow in critical studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Before joining NYU, she taught in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
Tom McDonough Tom McDonough is a professor of art history at Binghamton University, where he teaches histories of modern art and 20th-century French cultural and intellectual life. He writes frequently on contemporary art for journals and exhibition catalogues. His books include the anthology Boredom (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2017), The Situationists and the City (Verso, 2009), and “The Beautiful Language of My Century” (MIT Press, 2007).
Lindsay Caplan Lindsay Caplan is an Assistant Professor at Brown University where she teaches modern and contemporary art history. Her writing has appeared in Grey Room, ARTMargins, Piano b, Art in America, The Scholar & Feminist Online, and e-flux, as well as exhibition catalogues and edited collections. She has received fellowships from The Center of the Humanities at The CUNY Graduate Center (2010-14) and the American Council for Learned Societies (2015-16); and she was a Helena Rubinstein fellow in critical studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her book Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy received a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association and was recently published by University of Minnesota Press.
Revitalizing the social history of art, John Tagg’s writing on the histories of photography transformed the understanding of the field’s emergence, function and presence in Britain and the US, inspiring generations of artists, writers and scholars. In honor of his recent retirement and the launch of the exhibition Rhetorics of Documentary at Binghamton University, join him in conversation with art historian and the exhibition’s curator, Tom McDonough and LACP’s Executive Director, Rotem Rozental.
Topics explored: • Instrumental photography in the use of governmental systems. • Photographic archives. • Is there such a thing as documentary photography? • The burden of representation and the political consequences of photography.
Na’ama Klorman Eraqi (PhD 2013) has published her most recent essay, “Acting Out for the Camera: Performing Mizrachi Masculinity and the Politicization of the Jerusalem Neighborhood of Katamon Tet,” in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. The essay analyses photographs taken by Yàakov Shofar in 1978 showing teenage boys from Katamon Tet, an impoverished Mizrahi neighborhood of Jerusalem, performing for the camera. It argues that the images, first published in Shofar’s photo books Finding a Way Out (1981) and Born in Israel (1984), speak to the politicization of the Mizrahi youths as a result of social and political tensions in Katamon Tet. Reacting to Shofar as a socially-privileged outsider, the gestures of those pictured confront the hegemonic gaze of Shofar’s camera in an effort to theatricalize and thus undo mainstream stereotypes of Mizrahi masculinity.
Binghamton Art History 