Tom McDonough’s review of painter Jacqueline Humphries’s latest New York exhibition has appeared in Texte zur Kunst. You can read it at: https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/tom-mcdonough-jacqueline-humphries/.
Tom McDonough in Texte zur Kunst
Faculty
Next VizCult Talk: Howard G. Brown on Wednesday, February 1
VizCult: The Art History Department’s Visual Culture Workshop
presents
Howard G. Brown, Professor of History, Binghamton University, SUNY.
“Visualizing Violence in the Age of Enlightenment, 1650-1800”
Wednesday February 1 at 5:15 pm in FA 143
Open to all!
Jeffrey West Kirkwood at Bauhaus University
On Wednesday, January 26, Jeffrey Kirkwood will give a public lecture titled “The Worst Case: Computation and the New Regime of Inefficiency” at Bauhaus University. Details on the talk can be found at: https://allevents.in/weimar/lecture-|-jeffrey-west-kirkwood-|-%E2%80%9Ethe-worst-case-computation-and-the-new-regime-of-inefficiency/200023914157140
Julia Walker at the Center for Architecture
On Monday, January 23, AIA New York and the Center for Architecture will host a panel discussion with recipients of the Arnold W. Brunner Grant and moderated by Julia Walker. The Arnold W. Brunner Grant supports advanced studies in any area of architectural investigation that contribute to the knowledge, teaching, or practice of the art and science of architecture. The evening’s talk will welcome 2019 recipient Richard W. Hayes, AIA and 2020 recipient Lynnette Widder, and the discussion will explore their research on post-World War II architectural practice in Europe. The program begins at 6:00 PM at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012. More information can be found here.
Katherine Reinhart at the Université de Neuchâtel
On Tuesday 20 December, Katherine Reinhart, Assistant Professor of Art History, Binghamton University, SUNY, will give a public lecture titled “Painting the New Science: The Role of Scientific Images in Collaborative Image Making” at the Université de Neuchâtel Institut d’histoire de l’art et de muséologie.
Jeffrey West Kirkwood in Texte zur Kunst
Merging painting, sculpture, gaming, and video, the artist and programmer Rachel Rossin creates digital landscapes that focus on entropy, embodiment, and the effect of technology on our supposed individuality. In THE MAW OF, Rossin explores the historical development of the relationship between bodies and machines based on research into brain-computer interfaces. Part of her artistic project was a Virtual Reality installation at the circular lecture hall of the Tieranatomisches Theater during this year’s Gallery Weekend in Berlin. After having immersed himself into the reality of Rossin’s site-specific project, Jeffrey Kirkwood shares his personal experience with the work that he discusses as a characterization of our current situation, in which technology is no longer just an extension of the body but has merged into an operation indistinguishable from us or our innermost experiences.
https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/jeffrey-kirkwood-anatomy-of-the-digital/
Image: Frank Sperling
Tom McDonough at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
On Thursday 8 December, Tom McDonough will participate in a book launch and discussion celebrating the release of Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:), published on the occasion of Humphries’s 2021 solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The evening will feature a conversation between Daniel Marcus (Associate Curator, Wexner Center for the Arts), Courtney J. Martin (Director, Yale Center for British Art), and McDonough. The program begins at 6:30 PM and will be held at the ground floor space of Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th Street, New York. Admission is free and open to the public.
Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900
Cinema did not die with the digital: it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.
Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital.
Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.
Michal Heiman + John Tagg in conversation
Join the artist, Michal Heiman, in conversation with John Tagg (SUNY Distinguished Professor of Art History) about her recent work including the Dress Project and Michal Heiman Tests.
Tuesday, October 25, Noon-1 pm EST/ 8-9 pm IST. Registration link: https://binghamton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pf-mpqTspH9EGrn5jX3IOg8wCoEdsP5ow
Michal Heiman (b. 1954, based in Tel Aviv) is an artist, curator, member of the Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, theorist, and activist whose work inhabits the spaces between art and therapy, photography and diagnosis, theory and praxis. As installations, video, sound, photography, performance, and archival displays, her work has been shown in venues such as the University of Melbourne Museum of Art, Documenta X (Kassel), Le Quartier (Quimper), The Jewish Museum (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (Saitama City), The Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), the American University Museum (Washington DC), and the American Jewish University (Los Angeles).
John Tagg looks at forms of photographic practice that were not previously part of the History of Photography and writes about photography not as a self-contained medium but as a complex apparatus whose social effects and effects of meaning are multiple and diverse. His interests extend to the ways in which we construct histories of cultural technologies and visual regimes and to the range of theoretical debates that, since the 1970s, have transformed the business of art history. His publications, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages, include The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988), Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (1992) and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (2009).
Photograph of Heiman by Anton Sarokin
Photograph of Tagg by Jonathan Cohen, University Photographer
Tom McDonough in conversation with American artist Tony Cokes
On Tuesday 18 October, Tom McDonough, Professor of Art History, will hold a question and answer session with artist Tony Cokes following his talk for the Wexner Center for the Arts. The event will be held virtually at 5:00 PM. More information, including RSVP for the Zoom link, may be found at https://wexarts.org/talks-more/tony-cokes.
Next VizCult Talk: Tom McDonough on Wednesday, October 19
VizCult: The Art History Department’s Visual Culture Workshop
presents
Tom McDonough, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Art History Department, and a frequent essayist on contemporary art and artists.
“Wolfgang Tillmans and the Problem of Politics”
October 19 at 5:15 in FA 143
Tom McDonough in conversation with British artist Liam Gillick
On Friday 7 October, Tom McDonough, Professor of Art History, will hold a conversation with artist Liam Gillick about A Variability Quantifier (2022), a weather station he has designed for Fogo Island, Newfoundland, Canada. Known colloquially as The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, Gillick’s artwork forms part of a larger collaborative project that unites 28 arts organizations around the world through the World Weather Network in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada and Fogo Island Arts. Their dialogue takes place 5:00 – 6:00 PM in the Gathering Hall at the Fogo Island Inn. For more information, see: https://www.fogoislandarts.ca/fia-x-liam-gillick-a-variability-quantifier/.
Binghamton Art History 