Deferred Consumption: Three Talks on Economies of Art

Friday 12 February, 2016
2 - 4pm, $0

Triple Canopy
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

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With Sophia Le Fraga, Rebecca Matalon, and Marvin Taylor

A variety of techniques for saving and indexing have found a place in our everyday lives, allowing us to consolidate endless memory and productivity in pocket-sized devices. We’re instructed to make more prudent choices with our time, even as we feel ourselves surveilled, quantified, and recorded as points of information as never before. Writers and artists have responded to these developments in various ways: The library is frequently fetishized as a site of historical redemption, a location that will permit elementary school students and scholars alike unfettered access to unparalleled riches of the past, though it may also bring to light challenging, disruptive, or unassimilable facts; the museum is ever expanding to include more and more kinds of art, unrecognized at the time of its creation but now recovered for the benefit, pleasure, and instruction of contemporary audiences; the Web is a seemingly limitless plane of storage as well as memorial.

For Deferred Consumption participants Sophia Le Fraga, Rebecca Matalon, and Marvin Taylor will present short talks on the ways in which acts of recovery and memorialization, by professionals and the general public alike, now inform contemporary visual art and literature, and vice versa. They will discuss different modes and methods of saving, from the making of archives to the making of monuments. What can be said of the future historical significance of art and literature when all is to be saved? Is saving itself an act of validation or valuation? How do our choices around what to save and what to discard affect not just future generations, but the present? For whom do we save what we save, if not ourselves?

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