Conversation, Performance

Performance
The New York Times Performance for The Orozco Murals 
Saturday, November 12, 2:00 PM

Panel Discussion
Embodiments and Monumentality 
Saturday, November 12, 2:30 PM

Artist Pia Lindman re-enacts gestures of grief traced from images off the pages of The New York Times in her piece The New York Times Performance for The Orozco Murals. Lindman aims to interrupt the fictional continuity claimed by self-contained images, and to illuminate some of the relationships between a photograph, its mediation, and the idea of original content. Isolating and transferring these images to a different context—in this case The New School’s former dining room, with political frescoes by Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco from 1931—she points to their theatrical and media-based origin.

This process evokes French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, who described the politics of remembrance and representation as the process of forgetting, in the sense that it disfigures the past by turning it into the politics of the present.

The panel discussion addresses the representations of human bodies, death, and violence, and the relationship of such images to monumentality. It will examine the implications of re-enactments to historical and monumental representations. The speakers will also interrogate the ambivalent spaces between violence and its representation, where the gestures of the body are neutralized by representations that seek to install them in a specific political context.

Participants
Pia Lindman, artist and Fellow, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, political scientist and Fellow, Harvard University
Nato Thompson, Curator, MassMoCA

This event is part of the “Considering Forgiveness Cycle.”