About this workshop and public talk
Join Jennifer Doyle for a workshop and public talk "America Out of Iraq," on Friday, Feb 7th at The Graduate Center, CUNY as part of Sessions in Art and Practice, an annual series of workshops and talks led by artists, curators, scholars, and writers on topics in art, research, and writing. In 2020, the program develops the theme of “Writing in Tempo” to explore how writing might keep pace with its objects through interpretive, descriptive, and critical approaches to historicity, working within and against the grain of the rhythms and urgencies of the present.
Jennifer Doyle: America Out of Iraq
Public Talk: 6:30pm-8:00pm, in Martin E. Segal Theater Center
As we move towards the summer Olympics in Tokyo, the IOC issued the latest of its directives to athletes considering making gestures of protest within the space of the sport spectacle. Sports, they claim, are neutral. Political gestures are banned and protesting athletes, they promise, will be disciplined. In this talk, Jennifer Doyle draws from theorizations of war to reconsider the iconicity of the figure of the resistant athlete. Drawing from the work of contemporary artists inspired by Tommie Smith and John Carlos (who raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Olympics) and by Younis Mahmoud (the Iraqi national soccer team captain who, on winning the 2007 Asia Cup told media "I want America out of Iraq now"), Doyle offers a reading of the global sport spectacle as a distinct, intimate form of warfare practiced on and through the athlete's body. This talk is free and open to the public, but please click here to RSVP.
Graduate Student Workshop: 2:00-5:00pm, Room 3416
For this workshop (open to all graduate students), Jennifer Doyle takes the publication of Anti-fascism/Art/Theory, a special issue of Third Text, to stage a conversation about critical practice in our contemporary political moment. Ideally, participants will read Angela Dimitrikaki and Harry Weeks's "Introduction to What Hurts Us" and explore the articles in the issue. We will take up different modalities and expressions of especially racism in contemporary art practice, and institutional responses and non-responses to that racism. We will explore the relationship between liberal, inferential racism (as manifested in work by white artists which have become art "controversies") and the overt racism of the far right, as encountered in and around art (and about which relatively little is said in art criticism). We may also explore the ecologies of harassment which flourish around us and which are engaged (resisted and reproduced) by artists. Our conversation should center on the challenge of writing about specific cases — for example: the mobilization of anti-semitic tropes in the harassment of the artist Luke Turner, and the harassment ecology which grew around hewillnotdivide.us, an ongoing installation marking the duration of the Trump presidency, the substantial body of work which confronts the nature and history of racialized forms of violence (e.g. Kerry James Marshall's Heirlooms and Accessories), and other contemporary projects which spotlight the spooky resemblances between our moment and the phenomena the mainstream public filed away in a drawer marked "Never Again" (e.g. Susan Silton's "A potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past" (2018- ).
Graduate Students in all disciplines are encouraged to participate. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS WORKSHOP.
This program is organized by Jack Crawford, Mia Curran, Kirsten Gill, and Rachel Valinsky, and co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Art History, and the James Gallery and The Center for Humanities, with support from the John Rewald Endowment of the Ph.D. Program in Art History and the Doctoral Students’ Council at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
For more information about the Sessions in Art and Practice: Writing In Tempo series and a schedule of upcoming programs, visit sessionsinartandpractice.info
