Artists Space

Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford, Ian Hatcher & Sophia Le Fraga Readings Friday, October 16, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street “Performance is a bothersome word for writerly poets” writes poet Nathaniel Mackey in his essay “Sight-Specific, Sound-Specific…” from 2005. Despite twentieth century poetry’s rich tradition of performance, Mackey notes that in poetry there is often an expectation for words do the performing, as opposed to people or things. Yet, language exists beyond just words, and functions in tandem with images, gestures, bodies and technologies. In this series of readings, distinctions between the language of performance and the performance of language are blurred. Foregrounded are writerly poets who embrace images, gestures, bodies and technologies in the presentation of their poetry – as elements that don’t overshadow their poetics, but are embraced as part of its liveliness, and of reading as a social experience. The series is structured via themes of sound, the body, tech

Juliana Huxtable & LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs Readings Friday, October 9, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street “Performance is a bothersome word for writerly poets” writes poet Nathaniel Mackey in his essay “Sight-Specific, Sound-Specific…” from 2005. Despite twentieth century poetry’s rich tradition of performance, Mackey notes that in poetry there is often an expectation for words do the performing, as opposed to people or things. Yet, language exists beyond just words, and functions in tandem with images, gestures, bodies and technologies. In this series of readings, distinctions between the language of performance and the performance of language are blurred. Foregrounded are writerly poets who embrace images, gestures, bodies and technologies in the presentation of their poetry – as elements that don’t overshadow their poetics, but are embraced as part of its liveliness, and of reading as a social experience. The series is structured via themes of sound, the body, technology, theater and come

Talks & Readings Thursday, October 1, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street Ariana Reines will open the evening with a reading of “Littoral Madness”, a section from Chris Kraus’ forthcoming critical biography of Kathy Acker, and will complete the evening with readings of her poetry. In between two talks will be delivered by Melissa Gordon and Meredyth Sparks on the value of presence in art in relation to gender, history and genius. Melissa Gordon will discuss her research into female artists who have “dropped out” of the art world, framing their actions within the wider context of feminist art’s expansion / rejection of authorship, and attempting to debunk the assumptions of failure surrounding the gesture of being absent. Touching on the fallible notion of ‘the original’ and the problematic gesture of “aggregating” as recently written about by David Joselit, Gordon will consider recent court cases around authorship in order to question where the boundaries of an artist persona / authorship ar

Talk Tuesday, September 22, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street The International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine was inaugurated in Beirut, Lebanon, in March 1978, and was intended as the seed collection for a museum in exile. Inspired by the Museum of Resistance in Exile in Solidarity with Salvador Allende, the museum took the form of an itinerant exhibition that was meant to tour until it could "repatriate" to Palestine. Organized by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), comprising almost 200 works, donated by 200 artists from nearly 30 countries, the exhibition remains one of the most ambitious, in scale and scope, to have ever been showcased in the Arab world until this day. Tragically, during the Israeli army's siege of Beirut in 1982, sustained shelling destroyed the building where the works were stored as well as the exhibition's archival and documentary traces. This historical "ghost" exhibition has been an area of sustained research for Beirut-based writers and cur

Talk Friday, October 2, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street This discussion will consider the construction, performance and broadcast of gender archetypes over the last fifty years, and how these have been transformed, critiqued and subverted within visual art – specifically in the work of Dara Birnbaum and Joan Jonas. Both were part of a generation of women artists who began working in the 60s and 70s, and were pioneers in their radical address of subjectivity, imagery, artistic processes and technology. Within the wider social and political context, their work contained a powerful message of transformation that was extremely prescient: firstly, in relationship to writing by theorists such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway in the early 90s; and, more recently, the digital and virtual revolution’s effect on identity construction and performance. For more information click here artistsspace.org/programs/how-to-be-a-woman This public event was part of We (Not I), a four-day program of discurs

Double Bind with Rhea Anastas, Daniel Bozhkov, K8 Hardy, Leigh Ledare, and John Miller Book Launch & Talk Sunday, September 13, 4pm Co-presented with A.R.T. Press http://www.artresourcestransfer.org/#art/about For more information click here http://artistsspace.org/programs/double-bind

Finding Words Angie Keefer & Lynne Tillman A talk, a reading and a conversation in assorted voices Wednesday, September 30, 2015, doors 6.30pm, starts 7pm sharp Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street For more information click here http://artistsspace.org/programs/finding-words This public event was part of We (Not I), a four-day program of discursive meetings, presentations, and events bringing together a wide range of female artists, writers, curators and thinkers identifying with feminist practices to exchange and produce content addressing questions around the role of "we" in contemporary art practice, held at Artists Space between September 30 and October 3, 2015. For more information click here artistsspace.org/programs/we-not-i

Dr. Theodore Feder and Janet Hicks of the Artists Rights Society, Maxwell Graham, Hans Haacke, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, R. H. Quaytman, and Justice Barbara Jaffe Presentations & Discussion Wednesday, July 22, 2015, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street $5 Entrance Donation Members Free, Guaranteed Entry In light of recent action at the congressional level concerning artists’ resale rights, this event will provide a public forum for discussion around the proposed legislation of secondary market art sales in the US, and will locate these developments in relation to historical and international precedents and alternative models. In 2014 and 2015 Congressman Jerrold Nadler (Democrat, 10th District of New York) introduced into congress the American Royalties Too Act, or ART Act, which would grant visual artists a resale right enabling them to collect a percentage of any works re-sold for a profit at public auctions over a value of $5000. While there have been many previous unsuccessful attempts t

Artist Panel Thursday, July 16, 2015, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street $5 Entrance Donation Members Free, Guaranteed Entry This discussion considers Tom of Finland’s influence upon and reception by artists, as preeminent postwar gay icon. Moderator Bob Nickas will be joined by New York artists Collier Schorr, Nayland Blake and Carlos Motta. With the rise of queer theory since Tom of Finland distributed his first drawings in the early 1940s, its assimilation into the art world and the academy, and a growing, though necessarily incomplete, queer awareness within mainstream culture, both queer subject matter and its representation and contestation by artists have shifted radically. Tom of Finland’s drawings established an iconic, deviant masculinity, fundamentally playful and proud. They are formative to many artists’ understanding of the possibilities of representing a body. Yet their joyful projection of, and play upon, identity overlays an instinctive complexity: some of the drawings hand