Agency
20072008

While the concept of “Agency” lends itself to multiple interpretations within multiple contexts, the word and its varied meanings possess an intriguing specificity: the very idea of agency exists as a challenge to power, and probes where power rests, and how power shifts over time. At its core—and through its philosophical reiterations by pillars of Western thought ranging from Kant to Marx, from Descartes to Althusser—agency refers to the dynamics of human social relations, the relationship between object and subject. Our agency is unearthed at the intersection of our awareness, our identity, and our efficacy.

For some, people are agents of change in the same way that they are carriers of disease. Others define the subject as moral agent, and subjectivity as the coincidence of knowledge, identity and agency. The theme of agency is intended to provoke and stimulate, asking not how we can structure or assemble meaning, but, rather, how meaning is being implemented and applied, what the effects are of our being.

Questions of action and intervention in social relations and political life were at the core of this year’s multilayered expeditions into the concept of agency. A growing number of artists and thinkers create their own language in exploring agency, and in so doing touch on ideas such as responsibility, consciousness, connectivity, ecology, and momentum. As participants in the Vera List Center’s programs, they develop and showcase innovative models for collaboration and engagement.

Network

Catalogue

Agency: A Thematic & Partial Tour of The New School Art Collection

Panel

Looking Back Now. Performance over Three Decades: 1960s-1980s

Apr 24, 2008

Panel

Crafting Protest

Jan 26, 2008

Workshop

Strategies of Occupation: Grabbing Land, and the Political Agency of the Artist

Nov 29, 2007

Panel, Performance

Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context – You Didn’t Have to Be There: Photography, Performance, and Contemporary Art

Nov 14, 2007

AICA-USA Lecture

Michael Brenson: The View from Here

Nov 12, 2007

Conference

People. Passion. Perspective. — P.O.V – Twenty Years of Documentary Film, Day 2

Nov 9, 2007

Conference

People. Passion. Perspective.—P.O.V – Twenty Years of Documentary Film, Day 1

Nov 8, 2007

Talk

Stan Douglas

Nov 7, 2007

Conversation

Future Talk Now: Learning from New Orleans, the Western Balkans, and Acre, Brazil

Nov 1, 2007

Talk

Phoebe Washburn

Oct 24, 2007

Panel

Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context – Seeing and Being Seen

Oct 17, 2007

Talk

Michael Joo

Oct 3, 2007

Panel

Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context – The Legacy of Lisette Model

Sep 26, 2007

Lecture

Agency and Art in a Hyper-Consumerist Culture: The Agent as Artist, as Consumer and as Citizen

Sep 25, 2007

Seminar

9 Scripts from a Nation at War

Sep 17, 2007

Panel

Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context – Gilbert & George

May 9, 2007

Talk

Lisa Yuskavage

May 3, 2007

Conversation, Screening

Academy Award-nominated My Country, My Country (2006) – Featuring filmmaker Laura Poitras in conversation with Peter Davis

May 1, 2007

Talk

Charles Ray

Apr 18, 2007

Panel

ReForming India—Artistic Collectives Bend International Art Practices

Apr 16, 2007

Panel

Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere

Apr 13, 2007

Panel

High Times, Hard Times: Painting and Politics in New York City, 1967-1975

Apr 10, 2007

Talk

Alex Katz

Apr 4, 2007

Panel

Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context – Woman, War and Photography: A Tribute to Catherine Leroy

Mar 28, 2007

Screening

Reading Lebanon

Mar 22, 2007

Screening

Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954 – 003064

Mar 11, 2007

Panel

Position: Taking Sides in Conflict Photography Today

Feb 23, 2007

Panel

Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context – Behind the Faces of Fashion

Feb 21, 2007

Panel

Visualizing Iraqi Politics & Cultures in Iraq and Diaspora

Feb 16, 2007

Panel

Art as Mediation

Feb 15, 2007

Party

Marcia Tucker Memorial Tribute

Jan 12, 2007

Essay, Series

Art Collection Writing Award Winners, 2007–2008

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