LECTURE INTRODUCTION

Artist Pablo Helguera provides an introduction to his work while discussing emerging art practices that involve social interaction, research, and pedagogy.

ABOUT PABLO HELGUERA

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based visual and performance artist originally from Mexico City who has exhibited widely internationally. He is the author of five books including The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style, The Boy Inside the Letter, and Endingness. He is a Creative Capital grant recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow and currently is the Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art. He recently presented an exhibition entitled Committed Explanations in Geography in the Houghton Gallery of Cooper Union.

This lecture took place on April 27th, 2009 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

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.

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.

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.

Andrea Fraser talks about “institutional critique,” an approach to art making that emerged out of conceptual art in the late 1960s and has been associated with the work of Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Louise Lawler, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and others.

Fraser discusses the work of these artists as well as her own, and provides an overview of some of the theoretical, and practical issues raised by this kind of work and the continued need for it in today’s art world.

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 November 27th, 2007.

A Conversation with John Baldessari, Daniel Birnbaum, and Steven Henry Madoff

Daniel Birnbaum, curator of the 53rd Venice Biennale, and Steven Henry Madoff talk to John Baldessari about his art, life, and pedagogical practice. Baldessari explains the ideas behind his work for the Biennale,  as well as his role as a teacher, the LA art scene, Hollywood, and his enduring uncertainty over what constitutes a “part” versus a “whole.” This year Baldessari was awarded the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievment Award at the Bieannale.

Listen here or download this talk via our podcast.

A consideration of the New Museum’s show “Unmonumental” and the model of the “21st century object” it proposes, a well-networked piece of sculpture too internally diverse and intersected to be constrained by form but also enough of a mobile and autonomous objet to escape the fetters of site and circumstance. An artist’s top ten, a bundle of unique lifestyle choices, a hip playlist or mixed CD, with raw materials mined from thriftstores, Home Depot, used record shops, eBay and the many other databanks that now comprise what was once called everyday life.

ABOUT LANE RELYEA

Lane Relyea is an assistant professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and director of the Core Program and Art History at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art in America and Flash Art. He has also written recent monographs on Polly Apfelbaum, Richard Artschwager, Jeremy Blake, Vija Celmins, Toba Khedoori, Monique Prieto and Wolfgang Tillmans among others, and contributed to such exhibition catalogues as Public Offerings and Helter Skelter (both Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2001 and 1992 respectively). He has delivered lectures at Harvard University, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago among other venues.

The international border between the US and Mexico at the San Diego / Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the world. Approximately sixty million people cross annually, moving untold amounts of goods and services back and forth. A 60 linear-mile cross section, tangential to the border wall, between these two border cities compresses the most dramatic issues currently challenging our normative notions of architecture and urbanism. This trans border ‘cut’ begins 30 miles North of the border, in the periphery of San Diego and ends 30 miles South of the border.

We can find along this section’s trajectory a series of collisions, critical junctures, or conflicts between natural and artificial ecologies, top down development and bottom-up organization. It is in the midst of many of these metropolitan and territorial sites of conflict where contemporary architectural practice needs to reposition itself. In other words, no meaningful intervention can occur in the contemporary city, without first exposing the conditions, political and economic forces (jurisdiction and ownership), that have produced these collisions in the first place.

ABOUT TEDDY CRUZ

Teddy Cruz was born in Guatemala City. After earning the Rome Prize in Architecture and obtaining a MDesS-1997 at the Harvard GSD, he established his practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, and in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar, for his work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. In 2004-05 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics, and in 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial. He is currently an associate professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. 

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 March 23, 2009.
For more information on the Interdisciplinary Seminar go to http://cuids.org

To download this video as a podcast go here.