Calendar

Sean Raspet will exhibit three new molecules that have not previously existed. The molecules were designed by Raspet and synthesized in collaboration with Jing Wu and Professor Shengping Zheng of the Hunter College Chemistry Department. The starting materials for the molecules are common to both plant metabolism and the industrial production of things like rubber, perfume, plastic, and vitamins. Raspet is also working on a new business concerning the circulation of phosphorus, which he will present at the conclusion of the season.

Drawings and a sound work by Madeline Hollander, related to her installation New Max, will be on view in the study.

For three weeks at the Artist’s Institute, Hans Haacke will exhibit Condensation Cube (1963-65) alongside We (all) are the People (2003-2018) and related photographs. We (all) are the People is a poster he made for documenta 14, 2017, in Athens and Kassel. Its slogan is translated, for this New York iteration, into the languages of major immigrant populations that have come to the United States in recent years, legally or illegally. Among the twelve languages are Arab, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Haitian Creole. The poster will be exhibited in the gallery and on the Hunter College campus. Additional copies will be made available to visitors to put up around the city.

This exhibition is part of the fourteenth season of the Artist’s Institute with Madeline Hollander, Sean Raspet, and Sam Lewitt. Hans Haacke’s work with real-time systems is important to all three artists, and this exhibition is Haacke’s response to our invitation to display Condensation Cube as part of the season.

In recent years, new materialism has become an influential way of thinking about things, matter, humans, and nature. One of its central theses is that things have agency. But what are the merits of this idea? In his talk, Andreas Malm will outline a critique of new materialism as analytically weak and politically unhelpful, particularly in our rapidly warming world, where the agency that really matters is exclusively human. He will also consider some of the challenges to the aesthetic representation of climate change in light of these theoretical debates. This talk is deliberately polemical, and we encourage artists to come with questions.

Andreas Malm teaches Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War and of Fossil Capital, a seminal book on the roots of global warming in the rise of steam power. His new book, The Progress of This Storm, is out this month with Verso.

Visual artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander’s New Max (2018) involves four air-conditioning units and four dancers. Humans and machines perform together in four-hour intervals every Saturday from 2-6pm for a six-week period. If we typically think of choreography as sequencing the movement of dancers’ bodies, in New Max choreography is more akin to an operating system: how dancers will move in relation to A/C units, overhead lights, temperature, and the coming and going of visitors. Like cybernetic and systems art of the past, Hollander’s work is concerned with the shared circuits between the living and the technological. It also alludes to system crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, in other words, our warming planet.

Following the performance of New Max this Saturday, Madeline Hollander will talk with A. E. Benenson about her work for the Artist’s Institute, its connections to her past projects, and the points of common interest between their respective, ongoing research.

Madeline Hollander is an artist and choreographer who thinks about how new developments in technology, intellectual property, and mass-culture shape human movement and behavior. Her work, New Max, involves four air-conditioning units and four dancers that perform together at the Artist’s Institute every Saturday from 2–6pm through March 24th.

A. E. Benenson wrote the essay “▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░” for Madeline Hollander’s performance New Max. He is a writer and curator interested in how the forms and vocabularies of technology can revise our understanding of art.

Visual artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander’s New Max (2018) involves four air-conditioning units and four dancers. Humans and machines perform together in four-hour intervals every Saturday from 2-6pm for a six-week period. If we typically think of choreography as sequencing the movement of dancers’ bodies, in New Max choreography is more akin to an operating system: how dancers will move in relation to A/C units, overhead lights, temperature, and the coming and going of visitors. Like cybernetic and systems art of the past, Hollander’s work is concerned with the shared circuits between the living and the technological. It also alludes to system crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, in other words, our warming planet.

Visual artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander’s New Max (2018) involves four air-conditioning units and four dancers. Humans and machines perform together in four-hour intervals every Saturday from 2-6pm for a six-week period. If we typically think of choreography as sequencing the movement of dancers’ bodies, in New Max choreography is more akin to an operating system: how dancers will move in relation to A/C units, overhead lights, temperature, and the coming and going of visitors. Like cybernetic and systems art of the past, Hollander’s work is concerned with the shared circuits between the living and the technological. It also alludes to system crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, in other words, our warming planet.

Visual artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander’s New Max (2018) involves four air-conditioning units and four dancers. Humans and machines perform together in four-hour intervals every Saturday from 2-6pm for a six-week period. If we typically think of choreography as sequencing the movement of dancers’ bodies, in New Max choreography is more akin to an operating system: how dancers will move in relation to A/C units, overhead lights, temperature, and the coming and going of visitors. Like cybernetic and systems art of the past, Hollander’s work is concerned with the shared circuits between the living and the technological. It also alludes to system crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, in other words, our warming planet.

Visual artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander’s New Max (2018) involves four air-conditioning units and four dancers. Humans and machines perform together in four-hour intervals every Saturday from 2-6pm for a six-week period. If we typically think of choreography as sequencing the movement of dancers’ bodies, in New Max choreography is more akin to an operating system: how dancers will move in relation to A/C units, overhead lights, temperature, and the coming and going of visitors. Like cybernetic and systems art of the past, Hollander’s work is concerned with the shared circuits between the living and the technological. It also alludes to system crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, in other words, our warming planet.

Keller Easterling speaks at the Artist’s Institute this week about Medium Design.

“Medium thinking inverts the typical focus on object over field, and may also invert some habitual approaches to problem solving, aesthetics and politics. Like those media theorists who are returning to elemental understandings of media as surrounding environments of air, water, or earth, medium design treats space itself as an information system and a broad, inclusive mixing chamber for many social, political, technical networks. Infrastructural systems or spatial matrices may be ‘good to think with’ because they can’t be assessed with declarations and don’t respond to right answers. Even at a moment of digital ubiquity, space is an under-exploited medium of innovation and governance.

“Medium design is managing the potentials and relationships between objects—the activity or disposition immanent in their organization. It benefits from a curiosity about spatial wiring or reagents in spatial mixtures. The approach is less like designing an object and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of organization.”

Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist, writer, and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.

Visual artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander’s New Max (2018) involves four air-conditioning units and four dancers. Humans and machines perform together in four-hour intervals every Saturday from 2-6pm for a six-week period. If we typically think of choreography as sequencing the movement of dancers’ bodies, in New Max choreography is more akin to an operating system: how dancers will move in relation to A/C units, overhead lights, temperature, and the coming and going of visitors. Like cybernetic and systems art of the past, Hollander’s work is concerned with the shared circuits between the living and the technological. It also alludes to system crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, in other words, our warming planet.

Premiere of Madeline Hollander’s New Max, 6–8pm.

This spring at the Artist’s Institute, Madeline Hollander is choreographing to temperature; Sean Raspet is restructuring water, terpenoids, and phosphorus; and Sam Lewitt is teaching a class on materialism.

This spring at the Artist’s Institute, Madeline Hollander is choreographing to temperature; Sean Raspet is restructuring water, terpenoids, and phosphorus; and Sam Lewitt is teaching a class on materialism.