Artists Space Dialogues: Douglas Crimp and Bettina Funcke

Wednesday 03 February, 2016
7pm, $5

Artists Space, Books and Talks
55 Walker Street

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One of the defining characteristics of Artists Space’s work is dialogue: between artists, writers, scholars, theorists and our audiences.

Artists Space Dialogues takes the simple format of a public conversation between two people. Every month renowned art historian Bettina Funcke will talk with an influential figure in the field of contemporary art and visual culture, investigating their work and thinking, their histories, trajectories, and processes.

Curator and critic Douglas Crimp is professor of art history at the University of Rochester and was editor of October journal between 1977 and 1990. His writing and curatorial activities have had a sizable impact on art and culture over the past forty years, not least his groundbreaking essay and exhibition Pictures (Artists Space, 1977), which defined the postmodern relationship to image production.

Crimp’s close relationships and engagements with artists have led to key works of scholarship including On the Museum’s Ruins (with Louise Lawler), 1993; and “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, 2012, both published by The MIT Press. He has also addressed the intersection of culture, politics and the urban environment of New York City in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, 2002, and Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the Present (with Lynne Cooke) at the Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2010.

Before Pictures, Crimp’s memoir of New York in the 1970s, will be published next fall.

Taking its impetus from that memoir, how to pose old questions anew, as well as the role of dance in Crimp's life and writing will be some of the points of departure for the Artists Space Dialogue.

Writer and editor Bettina Funcke is author of Pop or Populus: Art between High and Low (Sternberg Press, 2009). As Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13), she produced a range of publications that included the notable series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts.

She leads seminars on contemporary art in the "Critical Theory and the Arts" Masters Program at School of Visual Arts. As a teacher, in her writings, dialogues, as well as her publishing projects, Funcke focuses on individual artists or thinkers, placing them in the context of a rapidly changing public realm in which art's growing popularity is inversely proportional to an increasing sense of political powerlessness. Recent publications included texts on Wade Guyton, Sarah Morris, and the state of the copy, as well as conversations with Laura Poitras, Fia Backström, and Robert Hullot-Kentor.

Funcke co-founded the publishing house The Leopard Press, which recently published Fuck Seth Price, a novel by Seth Price.

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