Calendar

Brooklyn Public Philosophers is entering its second year this September, and I’m very pleased at the fabulous group of speakers we have lined up in the coming months. I’m particularly jazzed that Nick Riggle (of Lafayette College) will be kicking the year off with a presentation of his work on street art. Here’s a bit more about Dr. Riggle’s talk, in his own words:

The Street in Street Art

Much of the excitement around street art is due to the feeling that it is, somehow, a new artform. What, if anything, accounts for this? How, if at all, is street art distinctive? One plausible answer is that street art is art that uses the street to give it the particular significance it has as art. This way of thinking about street art illuminates the difference between street art and other superficially similar artforms, including graffiti and public art. It also refines our understanding of how the street can and cannot be used for aesthetic and artistic ends. But what exactly is “the street”? It’s not merely slabs of concrete that cars can drive on—it is a cultural, public space. I take up the thought that one of the essential functions of the street is to promote public interaction. If that’s right, then there is a natural way to augment this way of thinking about what makes street art distinctive: street art is art that uses the street as such—that is, as a cultural space with the function of promoting public interaction. Through a range of examples, I show that street art is art that aims to harness and enhance this function in various ways. Street art is therefore truly in and of the street—it is an art of the street in the same sense that dancing is an art of movement, and sculpture an art of space.

As usual, we will meet at 7:00 P.M. in the Info Commons Lab at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. See you there!

Lisa Warenski, CCNY Dept of Philosophy
Babette Babich; Christopher Ketcham; Lisa Warenski
Songs of an Examined Life: Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

Authors read selections from the recently-released Leonard Cohen and Philosophy: Various Positions (Popular Culture and Philosophy), edited by Jason Holt.

With his uniquely compelling voice and unparalleled depth of artistic vision, the aesthetic quality and intellectual merit of Cohen’s work are above dispute; here, for the first time, a team of philosophers takes an in-depth look at its real significance. Join us for an evening of philosophical reflection on the work of this most enigmatic and mysterious pop-star poet.

Babette Babich, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and the author of The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance, Practice, and Technology (2013).

Christopher Ketcham, PhD, writes on social justice, philosophy and popular culture, and risk management, where he has contributed to and edited two books.

Lisa Warenski, PhD, is a philosopher who specializes in epistemology and metaphysics. She teaches at City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

$ 8 includes a drink, food menu available

Join us in celebrating the publication of Realism Materialism Art, an anthology of essays and artist projects published by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in conjunction with Sternberg Press and designed by Zak Group. Combining theoretical presentations with artistic interventions, the event will feature artists Diann Bauer and R. Lyon with curators Mohammad Salemy and Natalia Zuluaga alongside the book’s editors, Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik.

The event will be followed by a reception at the Artist’s Institute, 163 Eldridge Street, New York.

Realism Materialism Art (RMA) introduces a diverse selection of new realist and materialist philosophies and examines their ramifications in the arts. Encompassing neo-materialist theories, object-oriented ontologies, and neo-rationalist philosophies, RMA serves as a primer on “speculative realism,” considering its conceptual innovations as spurs to artistic thinking and practice and beyond. Despite their differences, these philosophical positions propose that thought can and does think outside itself, and that reality can be known without its being shaped by and for human comprehension. Today’s realisms and materialisms explicitly challenge many of the dominant assumptions of cultural practice and theoretical inquiry, opening up new domains of research and artistic inquiry.

Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the 35 essays in RMA offer a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly changing set of ideas and practices proposed by contemporary realisms and materialisms. The book demonstrates the broad challenge of realist and materialist approaches to received disciplinary categories and forms of practice, capturing their nascent reworking of art, philosophy, culture, theory, and science, among other fields. As such, RMA expands beyond the primarily philosophical context in which realism and materialism have developed.

Contributors: Armen Avanessian, Elie Ayache, Amanda Beech, Ray Brassier, Mikko Canini, Diana Coole, Christoph Cox, Manuel DeLanda, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tristan Garcia, Iain Hamilton Grant, Elizabeth Grosz, Boris Groys, Graham Harman, Terry Horgan, Jenny Jaskey, Katerina Kolozova, James Ladyman, François Laruelle, Nathan Lee, Suhail Malik, Quentin Meillassoux, Reza Negarestani, John Ó Maoilearca, Trevor Paglen, Luciana Parisi, Matthew Poole, Matjaž Potrč, João Ribas, Matthew Ritchie, Alicia Ritson, Susan Schuppli, Steven Shaviro, Nick Srnicek, Achim Szepanski, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, and Andy Weir.

For more information about Realism Materialism Art, including excerpts from the book, click here.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) was founded in 1990 as an exhibition and research center for the study of late 20th-century and contemporary art and culture and to explore experimental approaches to the presentation of these topics and their impact on our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial Studies and its graduate program have provided one of the world’s most forward thinking teaching and learning environments for the research and practice of contemporary art and curatorship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art, its mediation and its social significance. CCS Bard cultivates innovative thinking, radical research and new ways to challenge our understanding of the social and civic values of the visual arts. CCS Bard provides an intensive educational program alongside its public events, exhibitions, and publications, which collectively explore the critical potential of the institutions and practices of exhibition-making. It is uniquely positioned within the larger Center’s tripartite resources, which include the internationally renowned CCS Bard Library and Archives and the Hessel Museum of Art, with its rich permanent collection.
Center for Curatorial Studies and
Hessel Museum of Art
Bard College, PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
T +1 845 758 7598 / ccs@bard.edu
www.bard.edu/ccs

Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation & Nietzsche Circle present

Nietzsche and Dance
An Affirmation of Life: Friedrich Nietzsche, Isadora Duncan, and the Making of Modern Dance

Nietzsche inspired many modern dancers, none more so than Isadora Duncan. With this event on Nietzsche and Duncan we bring dancers and thinkers together to explore the dynamic relationship between dancing and thinking.

Followed by a wine and cheese reception

Performances and lectures by
Lori Belilove
Geoffrey Gee
Krista Johansson
Kimerer LaMothe
Yunus Tuncel

This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre’s oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre’s distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre’s incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre’s lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water’s edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.

Matthew C. Ally was supposed to be an ecologist. During the same semester in which he took a required course in “Temperate Forest Ecosystems,” he took an elective philosophy course called “Tyranny and Freedom.” The rest is history. He is professor of philosophy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York and coordinator of the BMCC Sustainability Studies Project. He has published articles on Sartre’s philosophy, progressive and radical pedagogy, philosophical ecology, environmentalism, and sustainability.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a brilliant, suspenseful mystery exploring the often dangerous intimacy between love, compulsion, and death.  It is also a profound meditation on the power of art.  While it invites us to go on seeing art as a mimesis – a “representation,” or “imitation” of life – it also cryptically asks whether art objects might do more than merely represent life, even whether they might exercise power over death. James Stewart’s Scotty has been compared to Orpheus in quest of Eurydice; I suggest that he’s worth comparing to Admetus, who wished he could be Orpheus, and who imagines clinging to a statue to recapture his lost wife. The spell cast by Hitchcock in Vertigo shows us just how bewitching art can be when it has us under its sway.

Monday, March 19, 2018 at 6pm. This event is part of the Philosophy Series at The Cornelia Street Café, located at 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014 (near Sixth Avenue and West 4th St.). Admission is $10, which includes the price of one drink. Reservations are recommended (212. 989.9319)

Nickolas Pappas is Professor of Philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he has taught since 1993. He is the author of several books and around 40 articles, mostly on topics in ancient philosophy. His books include the Routledge Philosophical Guidebook to Plato’s Republic, now in its third edition; and most recently The Philosopher’s New Clothes (Routledge, 2016).

Discussion with Seth Binsted, Michael Steinmann, and Yunus Tuncel. If you like to attend, Please RSVP by sending email to Luke Trusso at trussol@nietzschecircle.com