February 7 – “America Out of Iraq” with Jennifer Doyle
America Out of Iraq
February 7, 2020
Workshop: 2-5 pm, Room 3416, CUNY Graduate Center
This workshop is free for graduate students and first-come, first-serve. Please register here.
For this workshop, Jennifer Doyle takes the publication of Anti-fascism/Art/Theory, a special issue of Third Text, to stage a conversation about critical practice in our contemporary political moment. Ideally, participants will read Angela Dimitrikaki and Harry Weeks’s “Introduction to What Hurts Us” and explore the articles in the issue. We will take up different modalities and expressions of especially racism in contemporary art practice, and institutional responses and non-responses to that racism. We will explore the relationship between liberal, inferential racism (as manifested in work by white artists which have become art “controversies”) and the overt racism of the far-right, as encountered in and around art (and about which relatively little is said in art criticism). We may also explore the ecologies of harassment which flourish around us and which are engaged (resisted and reproduced) by artists. Our conversation should center on the challenge of writing about specific cases — for example: the mobilization of anti-semitic tropes in the harassment of the artist Luke Turner, and the harassment ecology which grew around hewillnotdivide.us, an ongoing installation marking the duration of the Trump presidency, the substantial body of work which confronts the nature and history of racialized forms of violence (e.g. Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories), and other contemporary projects which spotlight the spooky resemblances between our moment and the phenomena the mainstream public filed away in a drawer marked “Never Again” (e.g. Susan Silton’s “A potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past” (2018- ).
The Workshop will be followed by a public lecture in which Doyle draws from theorizations of war to reconsider the figure of the resistant athlete. This talk is free and open to the public. More details and RSVP here.
Talk: 6:30 pm-8 pm, Martin E. Segal Theater Center, CUNY Graduate Center