Writing Art History After Occupy
Join us for a conversation on art, politics, and the unfinished project of Occupy Wall Street with writers Lindsay Caplan, Colby Chamberlain, and Nadja Millner-Larsen.
All three authors first started drafting their recently published books in Fall 2011, in parallel with the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park. Though they cover different topics— the new media art of Arte Programmata, the organizational schemes of Fluxus chairman George Maciunas, the antirepresentational actionism of Black Mask—each book confronts the questions that OWS posed for the practice of art: What models are available for working collectively? How can and should art operate as a laboratory for activist strategies? How do cultural workers engage in politics directly, without mediation? At what point must the category of “art” be left behind? Together, the authors will discuss the impact of OWS on their writing of art history, and ask what resources the movement might still offer an uncertain future.
Order Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action
Order Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork
Order Arte Programmata
Lindsay Caplan is an assistant professor of art history at Brown University and the author of Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
Colby Chamberlain is an assistant professor of art history at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the author of Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Najda Millner-Larsen is a visiting scholar of Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU and the author of Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action (University of Chicago Press, 2023).