Friday early evening— “Closing Address: Exhibition of Friends”
To mark the conclusion of the four day workshop we have invited Prof. Madoff to share with us his current research and thinking on the exhibition. His closing address for the workshop will depart from the consideration of curating as a palliative act addressing – but not immune from – undercurrents of aesthetics that mirror the troubles of ethical collapse. The biopolitics of symmetry that has long squatted on humanistic assurances of Enlightenment order and the theology of a god of clockwork rationalism still reside beneath curatorial practice, as are practices of totalism. Could we rethink the project of “the exhibition” per se as a collaborative act of friendship among things that eschews authoritarian epistemological constrictions that remain a vestigial underpinning of exhibition-making?
Steven Henry Madoff is the founding Chair of the Masters in Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Previously, he served as Senior Critic at Yale University’s School of Art. He lectures internationally on such subjects as the history of interdisciplinary art, contemporary art, and art pedagogy. He has served as Executive Editor of ARTnews magazine and as President and Editorial Director of AltaCultura, a project of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His books include Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) from MIT Press; Pop Art: A Critical History from University of California Press; Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity from Princeton University Press; To Seminar (contributor) from Metropolis M Books. Forthcoming: What About Activism? (editor) from Sternberg Press; The Power of the Unseparate: Network Aesthetics and the Rise of Interdisciplinary Art; and After the Educational Turn: Critical Art Pedagogies and Decolonialism (contributor) from Black Dog Press. Essays on pedagogy have recently appeared in volumes associated with conferences at art academies in Beijing, Paris, Utrecht, and Gothenburg. He has written monographic essays on various artists, such as Marina Abramović, Georg Baselitz, Ann Hamilton, Rebecca Horn, Shirin Neshat, and Kimsooja, for museums and art institutions around the world. His criticism and journalism have been translated into many languages and have appeared regularly in such publications as the New York Times, Time magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Tate Etc., as well as in ARTnews and Modern Painters, where he has served as a Contributing Editor. He has curated exhibitions internationally over the last 30 years in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Madoff is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets. He holds his BA in English Literature from Columbia University, his MA in English and American Literature from Stanford University, and his PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University.
exhibition.school 