Major

Thu, Nov 6, 2008
7:30 PM

New Museum theater (directions)

Artist talk: Martha Rosler and Anton Vidokle in conversation

Part of Museum as Hub
 
Discussions, Music/Performance

Martha Rosler and Anton Vidokle talk about their practices and influences, artistic agency, art and politics, and the Bowery neighborhood. Rosler and Vidokle have collaborated and worked on many projects over the years, including Vidokle’s exhibition as temporary school at the New Museum, Night School, and the Martha Rosler Library.

Martha Rosler has been engaged with this neighborhood over the past three decades. Her 1974–75 work, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, offers a poetic, humorous, even elegaic interrogation of the concept of the Bowery as urban blight. For “Museum as Hub: Six Degrees,” Rosler presents Bowery High Lights—a two-channel video juxtaposing dozens of present-day photographs of and text about the Bowery neighborhood that record this moment in time and recall the Bowery’s ever-changing face and function within the city.

Anton Vidokle’s Night School is an ongoing seminar series organized by featuring artists, writers, and curators in conversation with the public over the course of the year. Initiated in January 2008, each seminar meets for three sessions on a given weekend—Thursday and Friday evenings and Saturday afternoon each month. For “Six Degrees,” Vidokle has created a resource station where visitors can view previous Night School seminars and recommended texts by seminar leaders. Monthly seminars will also continue through January 2009.

This program is in conjunction with “Museum as Hub: Six Degrees,” on view in the fifth-floor Museum as Hub space through January 11, 2009.

*This event is free but tickets are required. Tickets are available at the Visitor Services Desk.

Installation view, “Museum as Hub: Six Degrees.” Foreground, Anton Vidokle, Night School, 2007–8. Background, Martha Rosler, Bowery High Lights, 2008.

Sponsors TOP

This discussion is made possible by the Charlotte and Bill Ford Artist Talks Fund.

Museum as Hub is made possible by the Third Millennium Foundation.

Seeds of Tolerance

With additional generous support from Metlife Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Asian Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.

Profiles TOP

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives, after spending the 1970s in California. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennial of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); Documenta 12 and SkultpturProjekte Münster (2007); as well as many major international survey shows, including several Whitney Biennials. A retrospective of her work, "Positions in the Life World" (1998–2000), was shown in five European cities and at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography, New York, concurrently. Rosler has published fifteen books of photography, art, and writing, most recently Imágines públicas: La funcíon política de la imagen (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007). Rosler has been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize in 2006, and Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2007. She teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and Rutgers University.


Anton Vidokle

Anton Vidokle was born in Moscow and arrived in the US with his parents in 1981, settling on Broome Street on the Lower East Side. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennial, the Lyon Biennial, the Dakar Biennial, and at the Tate Modern, London; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Musée d’art Modern de la Ville de Paris; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; UCLA Hammer, Los Angeles; and Haus Der Kunst, Munich; among others. With Julieta Aranda, he organized e-flux video rental, which traveled to numerous institutions internationally. As founding director of e-flux, he has produced projects such as The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist; Do it; Utopia Station poster project; and organized An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life as well as the Martha Rosler Library. Vidokle initiated research into education as site for artistic practice as co-curator for Manifesta 6, which was canceled. In response to the cancellation, Vidokle set up an independent project in Berlin called Unitednationsplaza—a twelve-month initiative involving more than a hundred artists, writers, philosophers, and diverse audiences. Located behind a supermarket in East Berlin, the UNP program featured numerous seminars, lectures, screenings, book presentations, and projects.