Tuesday, May 24, 2016, 3-6 pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

As an artist, Ilich has exhibited internationally in a variety of cultural institutions and international art and media festivals, including Creative Time, Documenta 12 and 13, Transmediale, Ars Electronica, Berlinale Talent Campus, Walker Art Center, InSite, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Streaming Cinema Festival, Antidoto at Itau Cultural, International Festival of New Film Split, and Salón Internacional de Arte Digital de la Habana, among others. Ilich received his M.A. from the Media Art History program from Donau-Universität Krems in Austria. He has been a visiting lecturer in UCSD’s Department of Literature and has taught classes on narrative media for the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía in Sevilla. Ilich will hold a seminar and workshop for interested Ph.D. and MFA students as part of the programming for Sussages, the second Ph.D. art practice residency in the DCP Initiative organized by Javier Fresneda and collaborators Seth Ferris, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, Verónica Santiago Moniello, Saúl Hernández, Dominic P. Miller, and Kyle J Thompson.

Suggested reading:

Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Introduction, Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacondona

Recent Projects

Monday, April 25, 2016, 3:30pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Aurora Tang is a Los Angeles-based curator and researcher, with a focus on contemporary place-based practices. Since 2009, she has been Program Manager at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a non-profit research and education organization dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how our nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived. She has also worked with The Getty Conservation Institute, The Getty Research Institute, and High Desert Test Sites, where she served as Managing Director from 2011–2015. She will present a selection of recent projects, including independent research and curatorial work, as well as projects produced with the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Lucy Lippard: Art/Work of the 1960s and 70s 

Workshop with Ph.D. students Melinda Guillen and Paloma Checa-Gismero

Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 3:30pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

Sabeth Buchmann is Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she directs the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies. As an art historian and critic, she has published widely in academic journals, exhibition catalogs, and art magazines. Buchmann is on the advisory board of Texte zur Kunst, and with Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, and Susanne Leeb, is the editor of “Polypen”—a series of books on art criticism and political theory at b-books in Berlin. Since 1997, she has held visiting and guest professorships at various academies and universities. Her publications include Art After Conceptual Art (co-edited with Alexander Alberro) with MIT Press (2006); Denken Gegen das Denken. Produktion - Technologie - Subjektivität in Sol LeWitt, Hélio Oiticica und Yvonne Rainer with b-books (2007); Avant-garde, Film and Biopolitics (co-edited with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Greene) with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in cooperation with Schlebrügge Editor (2009).

Suggested Readings:

Lucy R. Lippard, I See/You Mean: A Novel. Los Angeles: Chrysalis Books, 1979.

Lucy R. Lippard and Charles Simonds, Cracking. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1979.

Lucy R. Lippard, Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists: An Exhibition. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1980.

Lucy R. Lippard, Connie Butler, Peter Plagens, and Griselda Pollock. From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74. London: Afterall Books, 2012. 

Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries.... New York: Praeger, [1973]. 

Carla Lonzi: Subjectivity of Work

Tuesday, January 26, 2016, 4pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

This lecture with feminist art historian Giovanna Zapperi is the pilot event of the Visual Cultures of Work research group in the DCP. Zapperi’s lecture contextualizes and analyzes the work of important art critic and feminist in post-WWII Italy Carla Lonzi (1931–1982), whose ideas about artistic alienation and masculinity sought to introduce a contemporary feminist critique of the capture of life and its reduction to labor. In 1969, she published Self-Portrait, a montage of a series of conversations, she recorded with fourteen artists (all male except Carla Accardi) between 1966 and 1969. The book also marked a departure: in 1970, together with Accardi, she co-founded Feminine Revolt, one of the first feminist collectives in Italy—and never came back to art criticism. Lonzi withdrew from the art world in 1970. In Lonzi’s texts, art emerges as entwined with a number of institutions, power relations, and strategies, as well as forms of sociability, life, and labor that structurally oppress women. Her works include: Self-Portrait (1969); Manifesto of the Feminine Revolt (1970); Let’s Spit on Hegel, The Clitoridian Woman and the Vaginal Woman, and Other Writings (1974).

Giovanna Zapperi is a Paris-based art historian who received her doctorate from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She has published numerous studies in anthologies, exhibition catalogues, critical articles, and reviews in France and abroad, including Les Cahiers du MNAM, Histoire de l’Art, Perspective, Oxford Art Journal, Art History, Kritische Berichte, and Parachute. Her dissertation on Marcel Duchamp received the City of Paris Award for Gender Studies, and was published in 2012. From 2005 to 2009, she was on the editorial board of the journal Multitudes; from 2007–2009, she was a visiting Rudolf Arnheim Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin; and in 2009, she was a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes. In 2010, Zapperi became a faculty member of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Bourges, where she teaches the history and theory of contemporary art. In 2014–2015, she was a fellow at the French Academy in Rome where she began working on her current book manuscript on the criticism and art historical work of radical Italian feminist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982). She co-curated the exhibition, SUITE RIVOLTA. Carla Lonzi's Feminism and the Art of Revolt on the Lonzi’s legacy within contemporary art.

Visiting Artist’s Lecture on Artistic Research

Thursday, May 21, 2015, 7pm

Friday, May 22, 2015, 12pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

In addition to addressing the notion of “artistic research,” Schaber lectures on her research-based practice on the work of American photographer Lewis Hine (1874–1940) and German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), as well as her photographic and text-based installation The Workhouse Room 2 (2012), which she made in collaboration with UC Santa Barbara sociologist Avery Gordon for Documenta 13. The following day, Ph.D. students and candidates in Art Practice, Visual Arts faculty and staff participated with Schaber in an afternoon seminar about art practice dissertations at UCSD and elsewhere.

Ines Schaber teaches in the Program of Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. She received her Ph.D. from the Visual Cultures/Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, after studying Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin and architectural theory at Princeton University as a DAAD fellow. Her dissertation entitled, Obtuse, Flitting by and Nevertheless There – Image Archives in Practice, examined the fundamental questions underlying archival photographic practices and traced new or alternate modes of archival practice to meet contemporary needs and methods of knowledge production. Her work was recently shown at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin (in collaboration with the filmmaker Madhusree Dutta); the 2014 steirischer herbst – Festival of New Art in Graz; the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (in collaboration with the artist Stefan Pente); and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (in collaboration with the architect Mathias Heyden). She has contributed to numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, including Grey Room, Topos Raum. Die Aktualität des Raumes in den Künsten der Gegenwart, No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night, and, with Mathias Heyden, Who says concrete doesn't burn, have you tried?

Exhibition curated by Melinda Guillen

Tuesday, May 19, 2015, 7–9pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

The reception will also coincide with the publication release of No Longer Extant produced by Seth Ferris, Adela Goldbard, Melinda Guillen, and Lorena Gomez Mostajo. Immediately following the reception of 5000, an exhibition closing party will take place in the SME Visual Arts Gallery with vinyl sets by B+, Karavaggio, and Seth.

Ana Mendieta, Selected Filmworks (1972-1982)

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (1974)

Dan Graham, Past Future Split Attention (1972)

Jane Crawford & Bob Fiore, Sheds (2004)

Tuesday, April 7, 2015, 5:30pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Exhibition curated by Melinda Guillen

Saturday, March 7, 2015, 3–5pm

Visual Arts Gallery @ SME 142

This event coincides with the UCSD Open Studios 2015 and follows the Department of Visual Arts's 8th Annual Ph.D. Symposium Hysterical Bodies: Disabling Normative Behavior in Contemporary Art.

Interpreting Anthropogeomorphology: Recent Programs and Projects of the Center for Land Use Interpretation

Thursday, March 5, 2015, 3:30pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. The organization was founded in 1994, and since that time it has produced dozens of exhibits on land use themes and regions, for public institutions all over the United States as well as overseas. CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use—the many perspectives of the landscape—into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land use” debates. Matthew Coolidge has been the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation since its inception in 1994. CLUI takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of land use through exhibitions, tours, and publications that draw on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history. Coolidge is the author and editor of Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Up River: Man-Made Sites of Interest on the Hudson from the Battery to Troy.

Suggested Readings:

Jeffrey Kastner, “There, Now: From Robert Smithson to Guantanamo.” In Max Andrews (ed.), Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, 2006: 22–32.

Matthew Coolidge, “A Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void.” Perspecta, Vol. 41, Grand Tour (2008): 94–101.

Tim Ridlen, Ph.D. in Art Practice

Tuesday, March 3, 2015, 5pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

In 1966, the script for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Hawks and Sparrows was published with his essay “The Cinema of Poetry.” That text made a compelling argument about the nature of cinematic language, while his film imagined a world in which birds could speak. This lecture takes the next logical step and asks: can birds make movies? First in a series of three video essays performed live, Part One of the Artist’s Field Library presents research on the epistemological capacity of art, asking what kind of knowledge does art produce? This presentation will be the culmination of Ridlen’s work in residence at the Discursive and Curatorial Productions Initiative.

Exhibition curated by Discursive and Curatorial Productions Initiative

Tuesday, February 24, 2015, 7–9pm

Visual Arts Gallery @ SME 142

The Double World: Stewardship & Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

Thursday, January 22, 2015, 4pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

Since its creation in 1970, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a large-scale earthwork, has been an icon of the Land arts movement. Situated on ten acres of land on the northeastern edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake—known by locals as “the meandering zone” with its ever-shifting shoreline—the work was documented by the artist across writings and still and moving images. However, the earthwork’s placement on the lake has at times resulted in its inaccessibility, lending an air of mystery to a natural environment devoid of property lines. A “double world” existing between the earthwork and the individuals, agencies, and organizations supporting it will be discussed from the work’s inception to today. Hikmet Sidney Loe teaches art history at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and for the Venture Program, Utah Humanities Council. She is an author, curator and lecturer with expertise in Land art; her research on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty has led to her cumulative work, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Robert Smithson’s Earthwork through Time and Place (under contract with University of Utah Press).

Suggested Readings:

Nico Israel, “Non-Site Unseen: How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” Artforum, vol. 41, no. 1 (September 2002): 172–177.

Jill Dawsey, “One on One: Jill Dawsey on Vik Muniz’s ‘Spiral Jetty after Robert Smithson.’” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – Open Space (January 24, 2011): http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2011/01/jill-dawsey-vik-muniz/

Mark Ruwedel, “The Land as Historical Archive.” American Art Vol. 10, Issue 1 (Spring 1996): 36-41.

Hikmet Sidney Loe, “On Medium, Narrative and Great Salt Lake: A Discussion with Matthew Coolidge and Tacita Dean.” 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine (February 2014): 1, 7.  http://artistsofutah.org/15bytes/14feb/page1.html

Hikmet Sidney Loe, “The Double World: A Survey of Spiral Jetty’s Stewardship.” 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine (August 2014): 5. ( http://artistsofutah.org/15bytes/14aug/page5.html )

Time and JG

Wednesday, November 5, 2014, 4–6pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean lead a graduate student seminar on the question of time and her recent work JG (2013)–a 35mm anamorphic film and installation based on her correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) about his writing and Robert Smithson’s earthwork and film, Spiral Jetty (both works, 1970). Moderated by Assistant Professor Alena Williams and Professor Anya Gallaccio, the event was part of the 2014 Russell Lectureship co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Suggested Readings:

Tacita Dean and Richard Torchia (eds.), JG. Glenside, PA: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2014.

Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1970), in Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

J.G. Ballard, “The Voices of Time” (1960), excerpts

George Baker, “The Cinema Model.”  in Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, eds., Robert Smithson: The Spiral Jetty. New York: Dia Center for the Arts with the University of California Press, 2005.

Exhibition curated by Katrin Pesch and Tim Ridlen

Allan Dwan, The Poisoned Flume (1911)

Thursday, June 5, 2014, 6pm

Visual Arts Gallery @ SME 142

Release of the fourth issue of Unweave, the publication of the Visual Art department’s Discursive and Curatorial Productions initiative, and the closing reception for Spheres of Glass. Published on occasion of the exhibition, this issue of Unweave comprises texts by Sabine Horlitz, Edward Kihn, Katrin Pesch, Tim Ridlen, Drew Snyder, Tom Sparrow, and Lesley Stern. There is a special screening of The Poisoned Flume, a one-reel Western from 1911, directed by Allan Dwan and produced by Flying A Studio in East County San Diego.

The Invisible College / Mariana Botey, The Passage of a Few (2000, digital transfer)

The Otolith Group, Medium Earth (2013)

Thursday, May 22, 2014, 6pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, 3 animated shorts (1929–1935, digital transfer)

Dziga Vertov, The Eleventh Year  (1928, digital transfer)

Thursday, May, 8, 2014, 5pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Those That Through the Ear Become an Atlas (2014)

Spheres of Glass: Related Programming

Thursday, May 1, 2014, 6pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

It doesn’t matter where I start, it’s too gigantine—too integrated like a Faroese fog to begin to narrate it as a story. Instead I always start to tell it from the middle. The beginning is lost, at least it quivers… I can think it into many plausible beginnings: the café with the faked antique-wood benches next to the ballet studio where we sent off our grant proposal, or the moment our ferry left Hirtshals, or the day you first walked into my studio. Or today. The film could begin today. But if it did, if it does, it also began deep in geological time with the Althing…

Curtis Tamm and Hermione Spriggs have worked closely together since 2012. Their current project (supported by the University of California), THOSE THAT THROUGH THE EAR BECOME AN ATLAS, involves a collaboration with the Swedish Museum of Natural History and a three-month long expedition to Atlantis. Special guests Curtis Tamm & Hermione Spriggs.

This idea of the island as a mind cuts things off, casts a clean, smooth shoreline around an otherwise infinitely fractal set of moving relationships. As such, the island functions as a screen, and in this sense it is also a trap.

This idea of the mind as a trap links things up, casts a jagged, scalloped shoreline around otherwise psychicly separated dimensions of fiction and reality. As such, the mind functions as a stage, and in this sense, it is also an island.

This idea of the trap as an island opens things up, casts a relational, extended shoreline around the otherwise rationally cleansed perimeters of the singular object. As such, the trap functions to charge, and in this sense, it is also a theatre.

Stop + Motion: On Animation, Inertia, and Innervation

Spheres of Glass: Related Programming

Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 5:30pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Proposing a “poetics” rather than a “theory” of animation, this presentation focuses on our phenomenological and cultural relations with stop motion model animation at a particularly frenzied historical moment in which we are personally and collectively trying to “keep pace” with the relentless and technologically-driven speed of daily life. In contrast to that speed, model animation's visible hesitancies, its material resistances and vulnerabilities, speak both to our bodies and our sense of increasing exhaustion, of being “worn out.” Model animation thus belies “virtual” animation’s “plasmaticness” to reveal the traces of a grave and grounding material “effortfulness” that emerges not as movement’s “other” but rather as its deep existential structure. It makes visible what we intimately and corporeally know but what the demands of our culture would deny: that animation in both life and cinema entails labor and is finite in both energy and its expenditure. Vivian Sobchack’s lecture is part of the Spheres of Glass exhibition.

Exhibition curated by Katrin Pesch and Tim Ridlen

Thursday, April 17, 2014, 5pm 

Visual Arts Gallery @ SME 142

Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 3pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

Judith Rodenbeck, Unweave Issue 2 contributor, will lead an informal discussion of her project: a radical examination of the critical and reflexive aspects of participatory and performative artwork through the lens of Allan Kaprow’s work. In her most recent book Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (MIT Press), happenings are cast as a form of participatory art that simultaneously delivers a radical critique of that very participation—a view that revises our understanding of contemporary constructions of the participatory as well as of 1960s projects from Fluxus to conceptual art. Rodenbeck is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Noble Foundation Chair in Modern Art and Culture at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal and the coauthor of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts—Events, Objects, Documents.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1978)

Gordon Matta-Clark, Underground Dailies (1977–2005)

Thursday, November 21, 2013,  5–6pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Screening of films by Nancy Holt and Gordon Matta-Clark in conjunction with the exhibition SUBTERRANEA, on view until January 16. Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels documents the making of her major site-specific sculptural work in the northwest Utah desert. Completed in 1976, the sculpture features a configuration of four concrete tubes or “tunnels” that are eight feet long and nine feet in diameter aligned with the sunrise and sunset of the summer and winter solstices. A kind of American Stonehenge, Sun Tunnels charts the yearly and daily cycles of the sun, and calls attention to human scale and perception within the vast desert landscape. For Gordon Matta-Clark’s Underground Dailies, the artist explored and documented the underground spaces of New York City. A range of sites, including the New York Central railroad tracks, Grand Central Station, 13th Street, Croton Aqueduct in Highgate, and others, shows the variety and complexity of the underground spaces and tunnels in the metropolitan area.

Albert Maysles, Gimme Shelter (1970)

Thursday, November 7, 2013, 8–10pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Albert Maysles’s Gimme Shelter (1970)—excerpted and played in reverse in Sam Durant’s 1999 Entropy in Reverse (Gimme Shelter Backwards) currently on view in the exhibition—documents the Rolling Stones on tour in 1969, culminating in the ill-fated Altamont Speedway free concert.

Conflict of the Faculties: Tensions in the Field of Art and Education

Friday, May 31, 2013, 3:30–5pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

Gareth James works at the intersection of theory and practice in the form of objects, images, writing, and pedagogy. His work often reacts to ideas of economy and production, while also displaying humor and inventiveness in outcomes that deal with the objective nature of art. Gareth is a co-founder of the Scorched Earth publication and was one of the founding members of the cooperatively organized Orchard Gallery. He currently teaches at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. James’s work is constituted through his abiding interest in histories of iconoclasm in which the social divisions and inequities that mark and delimit artistic practice are registered most emphatically. In James’ practice as an artist and as a writer, conventional aesthetic discourse is lost and rediscovered in neighboring fields such as topology or psychoanalysis; capitalist property relations are seen to exert as much determinative force on the visual field as phenomenological bodies; and theoretical materials are indistinct from physical ones in an incipient philosophy of materials. In his teaching, James incorporates a wide base of theoretical paradigms and experimental methodologies in order to examine the fullest extension of the field of art.

Suggested Readings: 

Paolo Virno, “Jokes and Innovative Action: For a Logic of Change,” in Multitude Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).

Gareth James, “Please Kill Me: ‘Children of the Projects’ Merlin Carpenter at American Fine Arts, Co., New York,” Texte zur Kunst 51 (September 2003).

Bruno Bosteels, “Introduction,” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (London; New York: Verso, 2009).

David Muenzer and Gareth James, “A Real Problem of Materials: Gareth James in Conversation,” Art Log, 24 October 2011.

Works by Catherine Czacki

Exhibition curated by Elizabeth D. Miller

Thursday, May 23, 2013, 6–8pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism

Thursday, May 2, 2013, 5–7pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406 

Inspired, in part, by Tania Bruguera’s workshop with the Discursive and Curatorial Productions initiative, Grant Kester’s talk will reflect on certain limitations in current models of art criticism as they relate to “dialogical” or participatory art practices. Grant Kester is one of the leading figures in the emerging critical dialogue around “relational” or “dialogical” art practices.

Educations Sentimental and Unsentimental: Repositioning the Politics of Art and Education

In collaboration with the University Art Gallery, UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts

Thursday, April 4, 2013, 10am–12pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406 

Suhail Malik will join us for our ongoing reading series Conflict of the Faculties: Tensions in the Field of Art and Education. Taking its title from Kant’s schema on how the academic disciplines should be ordered, interrelated, and overseen by the emerging state, this series of seminars and workshops addresses current tensions in the field of art and education. Because of, rather than despite, these tensions, critic and educator Suhail Malik has committed to the artist PhD as a new format and mechanism of art production, which marks a contested shift for academic and cultural institutions. (Malik is also positioned as a faculty member of the artist Ph.D. program at Goldsmiths, University of London and has supervised six Ph.D. candidates to completion.) “It’s a commonplace that education is a good thing. Until it comes to art education.” So begins Suhail Malik’s defense of school in the interest of education and specifically, the Ph.D. in Art Practice. Suhail Malik is a writer and holds a Readership in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, London, where he is Programme Co-Director of the MFA in Fine Art. For 2012–2013, Malik is Visiting Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York.

Suggested Readings:

Suhail Malik, “Educations Sentimental and Unsentimental: Repositioning the Politics of Art and Education,” in Taipei Biennial Reader (2010).

Dieter Lesage,  “The Academy is Back: On Education, the Bologna Process, and the Doctorate in the Arts,” in e-flux journal 4 (March 2009).

Jacques Derrida, “Mocholos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Eyes of the University, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 83–112.

Immanuel Kant, “Introduction” and “The Philosophy Faculty versus the Theology Faculty,” in Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 23–61.

Series: Conflict of the Faculties: Tensions in the Field of Art and Education

Thursday, February 28, 2013, 4–7pm  

Visual Arts @ SME 406

Tania Bruguera, whom the New York Times calls an “art world darling,” is best known for her often aggressive performances and installations that aim to disrupt ordinary ways of reacting to specific situations. The Cuban-born American artist is a graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and has held professorships at the University of Chicago and the University IUAV, Venice, Italy. She founded the Catedra de Arte de Conducta (School of the Art of Behavior) as an artist-led artwork/school that offers alternative training to art students in Cuba. Bruguera has created works for Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Biennial, Shanghai, and Site Santa Fe, among others. Her performances, events, installations, and social interventions blur the line between life and art, reflecting on dynamics of power and the politics of our current social structures. This program organized in collaboration with the annual Russell Lecture funded by the Russell Foundation, which was established in the will of Betty Russell, one of MCASD's founding docents and a long-time supporter of UCSD. Past Russell Lecture speakers have included Nancy Rubins (2006), Robert Irwin (2008), Sophie Calle (2009), and Isaac Julien (2011).

Series: Conflict of the Faculties: Tensions in the Field of Art and Education

Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 4–6pm

Visual Arts Presentation Lab @ SME 149

The idea of artistic research, along with the artist PhD, is a hotly debated topic today, especially in our moment of the information economy in the 21st century. But what does “artistic research” mean as artistic creativity finds itself under siege in our neoliberal climate, embedded in a network of consumer viability, scientific exploration, debates concerning practicality/usefulness and finally competing for attention in the over wrought consumer driven spectacular experience/event? The word “research” is bound to specific scientific connotations that are connected to its specific methodology, which is at odds with the way art is made and produced. Artistic research is not necessarily verifiable nor concerned with constancy and recurrence, but with just the opposite, variability and the process of becoming. As a model it must be assembled within its own functioning territories, histories, logics, methods, materials, spaces, temporalities and utilize apparatuses unique to its own history of production to investigate extra-disciplinary spheres of knowledge such as economics, political philosophy, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. Neidich employs this model of artistic research and will elucidate through examples from his practice.Warren Neidich is a Berlin and Los Angeles based artist, writer and activist. His work explores the interfaces between culture, memory, phenomenology, social mind, neuroscience within the context of Post-Fordist economic structures. Currently his practice has been directed towards noise compositions as neurobiological modifiers and the production of dissonant networks.

Suggested Readings:

Warren Neidich, “From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter.” In Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, edited by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich. (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010).

Claudia Slanar, “Interview with Warren Neidich.” New Interactive Practices in Contemporary Art, edited by Kathryn Brown (I.B. Tauris, 2013).

The Deep of the Modern: Manifesta 9 

Workshop: Exhibitions “Are Material Forces,” Too: Biennial Exhibitions as Platforms of Discursive and Material Production

Friday, October 19, 2012, 7pm and Saturday, October 20, 2012, 3pm

Visual Arts @ SME 406

Cuauhtémoc Medina, a Mexico City-based art critic, curator and historian who has a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Art from the University of Essex, and a BA in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City. He is a researcher at UNAM and has most recently curated the latest edition of MANIFESTA 9 European Biennial of Contemporary Art.  Medina was Tate Modern’s first Associate Curator of Latin American art.

Exhibition curated by Lucía Sanromán

Friday, September 14, 2012, 7pm

Visual Arts Gallery @ SME 142

NanoMacroMega was the inaugural exhibit in the Visual Arts Gallery in the SME building, where engineers, scientific researchers, and artists work side by side on projects that emphasize experimental thinking and technologies. Opening ceremonies included remarks by UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla and Dean of Arts and Humanities Seth Lerer, with a keynote by science fiction author and UC San Diego alumnus David Brin.