Calendar

Please note: this event was previously scheduled for Saturday, December 16. It has been rescheduled for January 13, 2018.

Milford Graves concludes his program at the Artist’s Institute in conversation with John Corbett. Graves will speak about his life and work as a percussionist, healer, and artist.

John Corbett is a critic, curator, and record producer based in Chicago. His books Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium and Microgroove: Forays into Other Music include essays on Graves’s work. He is co-founder of the gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey.

Seating is limited and is first-come, first-served. A recording of the talk will be available on our website following the event.

Nina Canell’s exhibition at the Artist’s Institute will be extended by one second, until December 22, 2017 at 6:00:01 PM EST.

Every so often, a leap second is added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) so that it continues to correspond with mean solar time (UT1). Without these one-second adjustments, time on Earth would drift slowly out of sync with the sun. These changes affect not only what is displayed on our watches and phones, but also the infrastructures that regulate and distribute energy.

Canell has introduced a “smear” second to be applied to the last minute of her exhibition. During this extra second, Canell will create a new work in the form of an edition of 61 copies, freely distributed to the first 61 people who send their postal address to smearsecond@theartistsinstitute.org.

Cable. Fiber. Link. Vein. Capillary. Wire. Insulate. Sever. Slice. Section. Profile. Stack. Infra. Structure. Base. Scaffold. Extra-diegetic. Materiality. Substrate. Medium. Physical. Protocol. Standard. Regularity. Noise. Scratch. Impurity. Void. Atoms. Bits. Elements.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation.

Nicole Starosielski writes and teaches about infrastructures, undersea cables, and the materiality of the internet.

Milford Graves doesn’t play the drums to keep time for the band. Emerging in the 1960s as a free jazz pioneer, he opened up percussion to a no-holds-barred celebration of its full vibratory potential. Graves latest work establishes a connection between the vibrations of the drums and the rhythms of the human heart, something he calls “biological music, a synthesis of the physical and mental, a mind-body deal.”

On Sunday, October 15th, The Artists Institute will present a concert and live recording of Milford Graves playing with William Parker and Shahzad Ismaily. As part of this historic event, Graves will speak about his relationship to vibration and music, incorporating his sculpture Beyond Polymath and the beating of a human heart.

This event is sold out.

Modern and contemporary art is, needless to say, a phenomenon of recent centuries; the same is true of sustained economic growth, a condition historically unheard-of before modern times and one pursued as an explicit political objective only since World War II. Economic growth clearly belongs among the fundamental features of modernity, and, without it, the compulsion to novelty characteristic of much art since the Industrial Revolution is difficult to imagine. And yet there exists virtually no reflection on growth as a basis of modern and contemporary art and aesthetics. In his lecture “Steady-State Aesthetics,” Benjamin Kunkel offers a set of provocative theses on our default aesthetic of endless growth—a way of seeing so habitual that we don’t see it­—and the different kind of art-making which might emerge in a society that no longer grows economically, even as it continues to develop artistically and otherwise. Ecological economists speak of  “steady-state economics” to describe such a post-growth condition: what might a steady-state aesthetics look like?

This event is free and open to the public and will take place at The Artist’s Institute, 132 E. 65th Street. Seating is limited and is first come, first served. A recording of the talk will be made available online by the following Saturday. 

Milford Graves doesn’t play the drums to keep time for the band. Emerging in the 1960s as a free jazz pioneer, he opened up percussion to a no-holds-barred celebration of its full vibratory potential. Graves latest work establishes a connection between the vibrations of the drums and the rhythms of the human heart, something he calls “biological music, a synthesis of the physical and mental, a mind-body deal.”

On Sunday, October 15th, The Artists Institute will present a concert and live recording of Milford Graves playing with William Parker and Shahzad Ismaily. As part of this historic event, Graves will speak about his relationship to vibration and music, incorporating his sculpture Beyond Polymath and the beating of a human heart.

This event is sold out.

Economic growth must continue. Economic growth must end. If an aporia occurs when we subscribe to contradictory propositions at the same time, this may be the great aporia of our time. Economic growth must continue; if it doesn’t, businesses stop investing, unemployment swells, and social cohesion crumbles. Unfortunately, it’s no less obvious that economic growth must stop; if the production and consumption of more and more goods, for more and more people, proceeds unchecked, environmental ruin is assured. Near stagnation across wealthy countries over the past decade presents growthlessness as an incipient capitalist hell. At the same time, a steady-state economy—one that no longer grows in its ecological dimensions—may offer the last best hope for socialism.

Political thinker Gopal Balakrishnan will join Benjamin Kunkel to discuss the end of economic growth as both a utopian and a dystopian prospect on Wednesday, September 27th at 7pm at the Artist’s Institute, 132 E. 65th Street.

Gopal Balakrishnan is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is on the Editorial Committee of the New Left Review. He has just completed a book on Marx’s Capital.

The Artist’s Institute’s thirteenth season opens with an exhibition by Nina Canell; sculpture and recordings from Milford Graves; and a steady-state library and bookstore organized by Benjamin Kunkel. This event will take place at the Artist’s Institute, 132 E. 65th Street.