Starship @ Artists Space Books & Talks
on the occasion of
Turning Inward
Lou Cantor, David Joselit and Reza Negarestani
Conversation & Book Launch
Wednesday, May 20, 7pm
Artists Space Books & Talks
55 Walker Street, NYC
Artists Space Books & Talks hosts a conversation between artist collective Lou Cantor, art historian David Joselit, and philosopher Reza Negarestani, moderated by artist Abraham Adams. The event marks the release of the publication Turning Inward (Sternberg Press, 2015), a collection of texts and essays edited by Lou Cantor and Clemens Jahn, to which Joselit and Negarestani contributed. Departing from metaphors of center and periphery that organized arts discourse in the twentieth century, Turning Inward addresses the spatial logic of globalization and its attendant breakdown of distinctions among modes of discourse from the visual arts to urbanism, politics, education, and philosophy. A group of works curated by Adams will be presented during the release, responding to themes raised by Joselit and Negarestani in the book.
This visual counterpart to the discussion—including works by John Miller, Mary Walling Blackburn, Lou Cantor, Rafael Kelman, Starship Magazine, Harm van den Dorpel, Josh Tonsfeldt, Andrew Ross, and Time Farm—will address problems of excess that have long characterized epistemology, since information surpassed individuals’ ability to assimilate it. The contemporary explosion of organized access to excess drives what Joselit observes in After Art to be a not-yet-fully-realized departure from efforts of avant-garde formal innovation toward a kind of “cultural diplomacy.” This ethics of circulation and exchange in place of simple escalation is resonant with the project of philosophy as described by Negarestani: an “enabling alienation,” that forces us from “home” ideas of goodness and truth as ideal objects toward “piecemeal” projects of “navigation.” The works presented propose a use of craft subordinated to epistemic concatenation; like geometric coordinates, what they create is not a new object but a virtual vector in the movement of concepts.
(Photos: Kolja Gläser, Nicolas Linnert)