Spring 2022
Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, many of which have become classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021), the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. She writes frequently on art, including essays on Carolee Schneemann, Matthew Barney, Sarah Lucas, Nayland Blake, Tala Madani, and Rachel Harrison, which will be collected in a volume of essays forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2023. For over a decade, Nelson taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. Since 2017, she has been a professor of English at the University of Southern California. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.
Schedule
Friday, January 14th, REDCAT, 10am-7:30pm
Care and Repair
VIRTUAL EVENT will be streamed via REDCAT and the Aesthetics & Politics YouTube Channel.
Join the MA Aesthetics and Politics program (School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts) for a one-day line-up of reflections and performances on the themes of care and repair. Creative thinkers and critical artists will join forces in a focused but festival-like gathering to experiment with different forms of presentation, attention, and debate. Under pandemic conditions, and with topics ranging from land acknowledgment to architecture and the ethics of care, neoliberalism and the imperative to “take care of yourself,” climate-change and the post-critical turn to repair, this event will feature contributions by among others Églantine Colon, Anders Dunker, Stephanie Mei Huang, Jia Yi Gu, Nick Nauman, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrío, Theresa Ambo, Kelly Stewart, Lucinda Trask, Damon Young, Dimitri Chamblas, Amy Howden-Chapman, Mireya Lucio, Adilifu Nama, and Maggie Nelson. Audience participation expected.
- 10am—10:10am—Opening remarks, Arne De Boever
PERFORMANCE 10:10am and throughout the day: Lucinda Trask, Platform with 3 sides
- 10:15am—10:45am--Theresa Ambo, Kelly Stewart, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrío, “On Land Acknowledgement”
- 10:45am—11:15am—Discussion
PERFORMANCE 11:15am--Dimitri Chamblas, Slow Show (screen version)
PAUSE/ 12PM-1PM
PERFORMANCE 1:10pm--Lucinda Trask
- 1pm—1:10pm—Opening remarks, Eglantine Colon
- 1:15pm—1:30pm— Églantine Colon, “The Problem with Breath” & Three Comments on Non-Reparative Care
- 1:35pm-1:50pm—Damon Young, “The Greatest Love of All”
- 1:55pm-2:10pm-- Adilifu Nama, “Bright Moments: Rahsaan Roland Kirk in the Age of Covid”
- 2:10pm—2:40pm--Discussion
PERFORMANCE 2:40pm: stephanie mei huang, how to hobble a young horse
- PAUSE/ 3:00-3:30PM
- 3:30pm—3:40pm--Opening remarks, Arne De Boever
PERFORMANCE 3:40pm--Lucinda Trask
- 3:45pm-4pm—Nick Nauman, “Take Stock in Decision”
- 4pm—4:15pm—Jia Yi Gu, “Major Repairs / Minor Spaces”
- 4:15pm—4:30pm—Anders Dunker, “Thinking Landscapes”
- 4:30pm—5pm--Discussion
PERFORMANCE 5pm—5:15pm—Amy Howden-Chapman, featuring Mireya Lucio, “The Apologies”
- 5:20pm—6:30pm--Roundtable with Maggie Nelson, featuring all participants, and moderated by Églantine Colon and Arne De Boever
- Bonus
- 7pm--Nick Nauman, “Hot broth and comestibles" (for conference speakers, performers, and MA students and faculty). Location TBA.
Monday, January 17th, REDCAT, 8:30pm
“Thinking Aloud With Others”
Public Lecture by Maggie Nelson (VIRTUAL EVENT)
Tickets available via REDCAT: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/10934939
Speakers and Performers for “Care and Repair”
Dr. Theresa Stewart-Ambo (Tongva/Luiseño) serves as an assistant professor of education studies and co-director of the Indigenous Futures Institute at UC San Diego. Her research explicates the role of higher education in Native Nation-building through an examination of historical and contemporary community-university relationships between Native nations and universities in California. Theresa holds a PhD in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from 2017-2019. Her work has been published in the American Education Research Journal, Journal of Higher Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and Social Text.
Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where he also directs the MA Aesthetics and Politics program. He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2012), Narrative Care (Bloomsbury, 2013), Plastic Sovereignties (Edinburgh, 2016), Finance Fictions (Fordham, 2018), and Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (Minnesota, 2019). His most recent book is François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
Dr. Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió is assistant professor in the department of Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego, where he is also faculty in the Design Lab, co-Director of the Just Transitions Initiative, and a member of the Indigenous Futures Institute. Shvartzberg Carrió researches histories and theories of architecture and geopolitics, particularly how architectural technologies and territorial infrastructures mediate regimes of settler colonial violence, racial capitalism, and decolonial futures.
Dimitri Chamblas joined the dance school of the Paris Opera at the age of ten. Over the course of his career, he has collaborated with the choreographers such as William Forsythe, Boris Charmatz, Mathilde Monnier, and Benjamin Millepied among others. He co-founded Edna association with choreographer Boris Charmatz in 1992. Together they created the duet À Bras-le-corps, which has been performed throughout the world and entered the Paris Opéra ballet repertory in 2018. He participated in the creation of Benjamin Millepied’s Los Angeles Dance Project. In 2015, he was appointed Artistic Director of the 3e Scène – Opéra national de Paris. In 2017, he was appointed as Dean of the School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles, where he lives. He was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 2019.
Églantine Colon is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in cultural studies, literary studies, and critical theory. After some years teaching contemporary Critical Theory and French & Francophone Studies at UC Berkeley, she is now based in Los Angeles, where she is a visiting scholar at CalArts’ School of Critical Studies. She has published essays on urban margins and precarity, Science Fiction, and on the relationships between non-reparative care, form, and governmentality. Since 2020, she has been one of the co-editors of the journal SubStance. She is currently translating into French The Blue Clerk, by Dionne Brand.
Anders Dunker is a visiting scholar at CalArts’ School of Critical Studies and author of Rediscovering Earth - 10 Dialogues about the Future of Nature (O/R books). He is a Norwegian writer and theorist focusing on the planetary future and a contributor to Le Monde diplomatique, Modern Times Review, kunstkritikk.com and The Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as a working member of the editorial board of Technophany - a Journal for Technology and Philosophy.
Jia Yi Gu is an architectural historian, curator, and designer. Her work focuses on histories of representation and display practices in architecture, with an emphasis on objects, exhibitions, and document history. She is director of MAK Center for Art and Architecture, co-director of the architecture research and design studio Spinagu with Maxi Spina, and Visiting Faculty in Architecture at the California College of Art.
Amy Howden-Chapman is an artist and writer, born in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and based in New York City. She is co-founder of the climate-crisis-and-culture platform, The Distance Plan (thedistanceplan.org), and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.
Stephanie Mei Huang is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist. They use a diverse range of media and strategies including film/video, installation, social interventions, sculpture, writing, and painting. Through research and practice, they aim to erode the violent mythologies that perpetuate exceptionalist narratives, in the hopes of excavating forgotten histories. They yearn to locate sites of emergence from which we can perhaps fabulate adjacent histories. They most recently exhibited at the Hauser and Wirth Book Lab, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the New Wight Biennial at the University of California Los Angeles, and the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, AZ).
Mireya Lucio is a Puerto Rico-born artist, writer, director, and performer residing in Los Angeles. She is co-creator (with Sallie Merkel) of Emotional Labor Co., the feminist, multi-media culture-making magical entity responsible for the video series The Commons and the iterative Witches' Cabaret.
Dr. Adilifu Nama is a Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. In books like Black Space, Super Black, and I Wonder U, he has mined American film, comics and music for the cultural politics of race and marginalization. He contends that genres and media that could be disregarded as escapism are arguably the most dominant expressions of and about our times. The Pop Culture Association honored his book Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino with the Best Reference/Primary Source Work Award.
Nicholas Nauman is a writer, cook, and musician (@nu.myn).
Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, many of which have become classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021), the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship.
Kelly Leah Stewart (Tongva/Luiseño) is an Ed.D. student in the Joint Degree Program in Educational Leadership at the University of California San Diego and California State University, San Marcos. She earned a Master of Arts in American Indian Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Building off her master’s thesis, (Re)writing and (Re)righting California Indian Histories: Legacies of Saint Boniface Indian Industrial School, 1890 to 1935, Kelly is currently working on her doctoral dissertation that will examine the legacy and educational experiences of California Indians who attended or are descendants of Catholic-run Mission Indian boarding schools in Southern California.
Lucinda Trask is a visual artist whose work is primarily concerned with reimagining the relationship between humans and what we perceive as inanimate material. She builds objects—ranging from sculptures to tools—to create new landscapes for the body to inhabit. Through use of these objects, and their construction methods, Lucinda encourages viewers to develop a mutualistic symbiosis with the matter they encounter in their daily lives, a shared responsibility between user and used. Her work takes many forms including installation, performance, sculpture, photography and writing.
Damon R. Young is Associate Professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Associate Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies, shortlisted for the ASAP Book Prize, and co-editor of “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism” (Social Text 127) and “Queer Bonds” (GLQ 17.2-3). He is currently working on two books: one on figures of refusal, sameness, transformation, and revolution in queer cinema and another on technological mediations of the self from the diary to Instagram.
Spring 2021
McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Capital is Dead (Verso Books), Sensoria (Verso Books), Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte) and various other things. Her next book is Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, to be published by Duke University Press in fall 2021. She is currently editing a special issue of eflux journal on trans | fem | aesthetics, to be published in Spring 2021. She was awarded the Thoma Prize for digital art writing in 2019. She is professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate liberal arts division of The New School, in New York City.
Schedule
Tuesday, Jan. 19, 10am-1pm (CalArts students only)
SEMINAR SESSION 1: “Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?”
McKenzie Wark
Readings:
Wednesday, Jan. 20, 10am-1pm
PUBLIC LECTURE 1: “Philosophy for Spiders: On Kathy Acker”
McKenzie Wark; in conversation with Matias Viegener
View on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AestheticsandPolitics
Friday, Jan. 22, 10am-1pm
PUBLIC LECTURE 2: “The Cis Gaze”
McKenzie Wark; Introduced and moderated by Andrea Fontenot
View on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AestheticsandPolitics
Monday, Jan. 25, 10am-1pm (CalArts students only)
SEMINAR SESSION 2: “Dysphoric Planet”
McKenzie Wark
Readings:
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Wark, Molecular Red, Preface and Conclusion.
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Wark, General Intellects, Paul Preciado.