Directed by Dean of Graduate Studies Renée Green, the graduate lecture series provides an opportunity for students to engage with the thoughts and productions of an international array of guest participants from a variety of fields. A goal of the series is to provoke students to imagine unfamiliar forms of perceiving and creating through exposure to challenging ideas that concern the ways in which different forms of contemporary and historical creative production can be conceived in the present.

One stimulus for thinking about this series is provided by this sentence: “Only because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting do we welcome it so warmly” (Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content). It is easily possible to feel indifference toward the “merely interesting.” In response to what can appear as a perpetual state of “interesting” spectacles, the invited speakers address these paradoxes of living. Their presentations and seminars will serve as opportunities to grapple with productions, conditions, and perspectives that can stimulate other kinds of responses. The speakers will not invite smooth or easy receptions of the aural, visual, or spatial operations with which they are engaged, but will, in contrast, raise questions from the perspective of producers and analysts about present and past forms of being and production.


Friday, January 22, 5:00pm
Louise Lawler
“Taking Place”

An effort both to reposition the viewer and to bring into question the status of art, Louise Lawler’s photographic work strives to blur the conventional art-world boundaries that obtain among artists, curators, dealers, critics, editors, and publishers. Drawing upon the methods in institutional critique developed by a number of her conceptual-art predecessors (Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke among them), she directs the force of her gaze at the bastions of the poststudio art-world infrastructure—galleries, museums, auction houses, and art fairs. She thereby makes salient art’s ambiguous, and often ambivalent, relationship to money, prestige, power, and the still-entrenched hierarchies of gender. Recent venues at which she has had solo exhibitions include Sprüth Magers in Berlin, Metro Pictures in New York City, and Yvon Lambert in Paris. Recent group exhibitions include such venues as the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (Florida, USA) and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA). Lawler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Friday, February 5, 5:00pm
Mika Tajima
“A Place for Transacting Abstractions”

Born in 1975 in Los Angeles, Mika Tajima is a New York City–based artist who, by connecting geometric abstraction to the shape of our built environment, explores activities, form, and performative roles defined by divisive social spaces. Solo-exhibitions venues include the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (Florida, USA) (2010), the Kitchen in New York City, the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art in Providence (Rhode Island, USA), and Elizabeth Dee in New York City. Group-exhibition venues include the Whitney Biennial 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (Ohio, USA). With Howie Chen (see below), Tajima is a founding member of New Humans, whose collaborations number such figures as Charles Atlas, Vito Acconci, and C. Spencer Yeh. New Humans’ released recordings include AKA (2008), Undercover (2006), and Disallow (2009).

Friday, February 26, 5:00pm
Trajal Harrell
“Maybe to Spectacle: Showpony and Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church”

Trajal Harrell is active in many artist-led curatorial and publishing initiatives at Movement Research and at Danspace Project, both in New York City, and was an artistic mentor for the DanceWeb 2008 program at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival. Harrell’s choreographic works have been performed at such venues as the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami (Florida, USA), Melkweg in Amsterdam, Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers (France), In Transit in Berlin, PRISMA in Mexico City, and, in New York City, the New Museum, the Kitchen, the Dance Theater Workshop, and Performance Space 122. Other work includes Showpony, Quartet for the End of Time, and Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (S). Twenty Looks was recently performed at Workspace Brussels (Belgium) and, in 2010, will be featured both at the 12th Artdanthé Festival in Vanves (France) and at Summer Stages at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston.

Friday, March 5, 6:00pm / Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room
Renée Green
“Ongoing Becomings: The Whole Is Simpler Than the Parts”

Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and producer. Through Free Agent Media, her moniker since 1994, she has produced videos, films, writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series, and events that engage and analyze circuits of exchange over time, exploring what can now be made, thought, and felt within a changing transcultural sphere. Solo-exhibition venues include the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (UK), Portikus in Frankfurt (Germany), Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, Secession in Vienna, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A retrospective, Ongoing Becomings 1989–2009, was recently exhibited at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (France). The exhibition Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams opens in February 2010 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Green is Dean of Graduate Studies at SFAI and a guest faculty member at the Whitney Independent Study Program and at Maumaus in Lisbon. Green’s lecture is copresented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco—free with gallery admission or with SFAI photo ID.

Friday, March 26, 5:00pm
Howie Chen
“More Anytime Minutes: Post-Fordist Work Dilemmas”

Howie Chen is a New York–based curator who is a cofounder of Dispatch, a curatorial production office and project space in the Lower East Side. With artist Mika Tajima (see above), he founded New Humans, a noise band and moniker for collaborations with musicians, artists, and designers. Dispatch offers a model for curatorial production: an office for receiving and originating exhibitions, projects, and concepts treated as time-sensitive transmissions. He has curated exhibitions and programs at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in Long Island City (New York). New Humans was included in the Whitney Biennial 2008—a collaboration with Vito Acconci and musician C. Spencer Yeh—and more recently at SFMOMA with collaborator Charles Atlas. Chen is currently researching the ways in which critical practice can direct new collective strategies and negotiating positions and assert new forms of artistic production.

Friday, April 2, 5:00pm
George E. Lewis
“Mobilitas Animi: Improvising with Creative Machines”

George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is a composer and improviser whose electronic and computer music, computer-based installations, and notated and improvisatory forms have been documented on more than 120 recordings. Lewis’s widely acclaimed book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008) was a 2009 recipient of the American Book Award.

Friday, April 23, 5:00pm
John Akomfrah
“The Burden of Mnemosyne”

A founding figure in Black British cinema, John Akomfrah is an artist, writer, critic, and filmmaker. Internationally recognized for his long-time tenure with the London-based media workshop Black Audio Film Collective (of which he was one of the founders in 1982), he formalized his focus on issues of Black British identity by developing an array of media adequate for and relevant to the representation of that identity. He made his directorial debut with the seminal, prize-winning Handsworth Songs (1986), a film that began a career-long artistic odyssey in the reconfiguration of documentary conventions for contemporary Black British experience. Other works include Testament (1988), about an African politician remanded to exile after a coup d’etat; Who Needs a Heart? (1991) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), both concerning the advent of Black power in Britain; and Speak like a Child (1998), a psychological drama. Akomfrah is a former governor of the British Film Institute.

Friday, April 30, 5:00pm
Michael Corris
“Unintended Consequences: Conceptual Art and Its Legacy”

Professor of Art and Chair of the Division of Art at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, Michael Corris is an artist and writer on art. During the 1970s, he was part of Art & Language, the seminal conceptual-art collective. Alongside Mel Ramsden, Joseph Kosuth, and Sarah Charlesworth, he was a founding editor of The Fox, which addressed the theoretical, political, and social contexts of contemporary artistic practice. Corris currently focuses and writes on the critical and aesthetic issues yielded by the more innovative and enduring practices of conceptual art: a cluster of explicitly dialogical practices enabled by conversation, artist-spectator interaction, and social intervention. Recent publications (as author or editor) include Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (2004), Ad Reinhardt (2008), and, coauthored with John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas, Art, Word and Image: 1,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction (2009). See Corris’s “Blurting in A & L” here.

Unless otherwise noted, all lectures are held on Fridays at 5:00pm in the SFAI Lecture Hall on the 800 Chestnut Street campus and are free and open to the public.

The graduate lecture series—Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking & Action—is organized through SFAI’s Division of Graduate Studies in cooperation with SFAI’s Centers for Interdisciplinary Study.