Critical Theory Reading Group

The group is comprised of graduate students, both MFA and Ph.D. in Visual Arts, as well as outside departments and welcomes interests from a variety of sources within and related to the visual arts. Each meeting is student-led and hosted in the DCP space. Previous discussion topics have been as diverse as Adorno's writings on motif, the concept of "use-value", death and Surrealism through Bataille's "Visions of Excess," historicity in Lucy R. Lippard's "Six Year" and readings by Visual Arts faculty including Norman Bryson and Mariana Botey. Topics are student-generated and meetings are hosted at the DCP space approximately every third week during the academic year. 

June 3, 2015

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. I: “Consumption.” New York: Zone Books, 1988. (selections)

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. New York: Verson, 1998. (selections)

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House, 1994. (selections)

May 13, 2015

Wardwell, Mariana. Zonas de Disturbio: Espectros del México Indígena en la Modernidad. 2015. (selections)

April 22, 2015

Hollier, Denis. “The Use-Value of the Impossible.” Translated by Liesl Ollman. October 60 (Spring 1992): 3-24.

Mann, Paul. “Economies.” In The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. (selections)

February 9, 2015

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions (Autonomedia), 2013.

Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute: New York: The Free Press, 1977; Hassocks, England: The Harvester Press, 1977. (Chapters 3 & 4)

January 12, 2015

Lucy Lippard, "Preface" and "Escape Attempts," Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.

Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, "A User's Guide to Entropy." October, Vol. 78, (Autumn, 1996): 38-88.

December 8, 2014

Adorno, Theodore. “Motifs.” (selections)

Dietz, Bill. “Composing Listening.” Performance Research 16:3: 56-61.

Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4 (Fall 2013). (selections)

November 17, 2014

Muñoz, José Esteban. "Introduction." In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. (selections)

Balibar, Etienne. "The Nation Form: History and Ideology." In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1988. (selections)

October 30, 2014

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: the Economic World Reversed.” In The Field of Cultural Production, Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993: 29-71.

Foucault, Michel. “Description of Statements.” In The Archaeology of Knowledge, 106-117.