This lecture concerns a different position within Modernist practice, neither vanguard nor resistant, which proceeds by way of a mimetic exacerbation of the worst conditions in contemporary society.

ABOUT HAL FOSTER

Hal Foster joined the faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton in 1997, and is currently its chair. He teaches lecture and seminar courses in modernist and contemporary art and criticism as well as regularly teaching in the programs of Media and Modernity and European Cultural Studies. His most recent books areDesign and Crime (and Other Diatribes)from Verso (2002); Prosthetic Gods(Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2004), and he is presently at work on a collection of essays on Pop art. He continues to write regularly for the October, Artforum, and the London Review of Books.

This talk is a part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Cooper Union School of Art. The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad.

This talk took place on April 6th, 2009.

The festival showcases features length films by such prominent directors as Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman and Frank Capra, together with experimental projects unearthed from archives worldwide. Some highlights of the program include: Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954), Michelangelo Antonioni’s  Le Amiche (1955),  Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922),  Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s Le joli mai (1963), Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), and Loin de Vietnam (1967), a collaborative work by Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, etc.

Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed). 1926. Germany. Directed by Lotte Reiniger.

Taking the recent hi-profile cultural activities surrounding Al Gore’s climate change campaign as the point of entry, this talk will address how the increasingly prominent trope of sustainability — defined by the UN in 1983 as “development that meets their own”– provides a fertile, through highly contested terrain for politicizing artistic and design activities that might go beyond the rhetoric of neo-situationist militancy so popular in the artworld today. The talk was designed to have a site-specific resonance, insofar as Cooper Union is an institution that brings together artists, architects and industrial designers, all fields that have been called upon in various ways to contribute to the so-called “Neo-Green Revolution.”

This talk is a part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Cooper Union School of Art. The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad.

This talk took place on October 30th, 2007.

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A lecture drawn from Cripm’s memoir in progress of New York City in the 1970s. This portion deals with the de-industrializing city as a space of experimentation for artists and gay men, with a particular focus on the abandoned Hudson river pier.

This talk is a part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Cooper Union School of Art. The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad.

This talk took place on September 18th, 2007.

Unlike many art prizes, this one has no restrictions on age or nationality, so the finalists are often a mix of international figures, and that is true this year. “That there are artists from the Middle East and Asia reflects how we continue to learn more and more about art around the world,” said Nancy Spector, chief curator of the foundation and chairwoman of the six-person jury that will select the winner.

The Hugo Boss Prize winner will be announced in the fall of 2010 and will also receive a solo show in 2011 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

This year’s list, which was announced on Thursday evening, is an eclectic one that leans heavily toward conceptual and performance artists. It includes no painters. The finalists are Beijing artist Cao Fei; German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann; Natascha Sadr Haghighian, a Berlin-based conceptual artist; Roman Ondak, a Slovakian artist who represented his country in the 2009 Venice Biennale; Lebanese artist Walid Raad; and the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

“Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation.”
— J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Today Icarus Films releases the DVD of Chantal Akerman’s film FROM THE EAST.

FROM THE EAST retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. It is a voyage Chantal Akerman wanted to make shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc “before it was too late,” reconstructing her impressions in the manner of a documentary on the border of fiction.

By filming “everything that touched me,” Akerman sifts through and fixes upon sounds and images as she follows the thread of this subjective crossing. Without dialogue or commentary, FROM THE EAST is a cinematographic elegy.

Born in Brussels, Belgium in 1950, Chantal Akerman is a filmmaker whose work gives new meaning to the term “independent film.” An Akerman film is an exercise in pure independence, pure creativity, and pure art. The viewer must give him- or herself over completely to the experience of the film, to watch with open eyes and an open mind. To label Akerman’s work “minimalist” or “structuralist” or “feminist” is to miss most of what she is about. Strong themes in her films include women at work and at home, women’s relationships to men, women, and children, food, love, sex, romance, art, and storytelling. Each Akerman film is a world unto itself and demands to be explored on its own terms. Her films are the subject of two recent books: Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everday by Ivone Margulies.

The video above is a recording of a talk by Chantal Akerman at MIT in May, 2008.

Melissa Anderson also wrote a nice piece on the film for Artforum.

In conjunction with Into the Sunset at the MoMA, which examines how photography has pictured the idea of the American West from 1850 to the present, this panel features photographers, a filmmaker, and a writer in a discussion of how their work elicits and contributes to our collective imagination and narratives of the West.

Participants include photographer Katy Grannan, writer Annie Proulx, and photographer, filmmaker, and actor Dennis Hopper. Eva Respini, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, and organizer of the exhibition moderates a discussion.

Chairs have a special place in the heart of designers. Designer Ron Arad calls them ‘containers for invisible sitters.’ In this video produced by MoMA Rod Arad gives a tour through his impressive show at the museum.

On View August 2–October 29, 2009
View the exhibition site at www.moma.org/ronarad

Daniel Libeskind builds on very big ideas. Here, he shares 17 words that underlie his vision for architecture — raw, risky, emotional, radical — and that offer inspiration for any bold creative pursuit.