Master’s Program in Aesthetics and Politics

Master’s Program in Aesthetics and Politics

Welcome! This is a program for artists and thinkers who are interested in the crossover of aesthetics and politics in the contemporary world. This program encourages new interrogations of the expanded field of the arts through readings of texts, artworks, group discussion and a rich calendar of public events.

About the Program

We offer a dynamic and intensive experience that develops a shared vocabulary and critical framework in which we discuss phenomena ranging from the Arab Spring to neo-benshi, from bioart to neoliberalism, from human rights to queer hiphop and third world cinema.

Students develop ideas through presenting ongoing written work in a discursive environment with peers and are encouraged to focus their work by choosing credits from a list of elective courses. We offer a set of core courses in aesthetic theory, political thought, critical discourse in the arts and the media, and theoretical writing that are the foundation of the degree. In addition, students are able to specialize in one of three areas of concentration--critical theory, global studies, or media and urban studies--to work towards a written thesis submitted at the end of the program. The program values individual development by providing one-to-one mentorship with specialists within your field, student fora and a rich variety of internationally renowned visiting speakers.

Selected applicants are awarded Teaching Assistantships that can be turned into a Research Assistantship in the Spring semester. All MA-candidates significantly improve their reading and writing skills, oral presentation skills, and creative and critical abilities during their one-year intensive training with us. The scope of the program enables students to achieve their ambitions in their career choices and opens the doors to new possibilities for life after postgraduate study. The program helps prepare students for careers in a range of vocations, including art criticism, critical art-making, curatorial practice, politics, research at PhD-level, and more.

For more information about our curriculum, faculty, and the events we have on offer, please click through the page-links on the left. Join us in Los Angeles for the year-long WHAP! series or contact our admissions counselor if you want to visit us and observe a class.  

We look forward to welcoming you to CalArts.

Last edited by adeboever on Jan 07, 2013

News & Events

Spring 2013

  • The Commons lecture series welcomes: Kate Marshall on Thursday, May 2nd, 4 pm, at Tatum lounge (CalArts). The title of Kate’s talk will be “Novels by Aliens.” In Kate Marshall’s first book, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (forthcoming U of Minnesota P, 2013), she shows how the banal circulation technologies underlying modern life--such as corridors, plumbing systems, duct work, and highways–become dynamic media forms in the modern American novel. Marshall’s research project “Novels by Aliens” examines how contemporary experiments in nonhuman narration and theoretical debates in the category of the nonhuman have an important and overlooked history in the old, weird American fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  • Friday, may 3rd, at 1 pm: Conversation about media, architecture, and speculative fiction of the American landscape with artist Connie Samaras, Kate Marshall, and curator Matthew Poole as a respondent, Caldwell Gallery, Armory Center for the Arts, 1 pm, 145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, 91103.
  • April 30th and May 1st: the A&P lecture series ends at the West Hollywood Public Library with a graduate student panel on Hannah Arendt, featuring A&P alumns Geoff Derven and Manuel Shvartzberg, as well as Ella Street; followed on Wednesday by a conversation at REDCAT about the work of Claude Lefort, featuring Claudia Hilb and Bernie Flynn. Reception to follow. More info on the A&P lecture series page. 
  • April 26th: last WHAP! event of the season... on urban planning and West Hollywood. Hosted by A&P alumn and WEHO city councilman John D'Amico. More info on our WHAP! page.
  • April 17th-18th: film-philosopher John Mullarkey joins us as our Theorist in Residence. John will be teaching a faculty seminar on Wednesday and a student seminar on Thursday, and give a public lecture on Thursday, at 4pm, in LANGLEY on cinema, objects, and animals. With Michael Pisaro from the School of Music as a respondent.
  • For her show, "we don´t just want a piece of the pie, we want the whole fucking bakery!" (April 15th-19th, Mint Gallery), Karin Winkler will be hosting Emory Douglas, former minister of culture of the Black Panther Party. Douglas will lecture at CalArts on Monday April 15th, at 7pm, A211 H (art office). The lecture will be followed by a conversation about the Black Panther Party and the grammars of current movements, moderated by Paula Cobo Guevara (MA candidate, Aesthetics and Politics). 
  • Thursday, April 11th, 6pm, F200: Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda from e-flux. In collaboration with the School of Art's Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture series. 
  • On Thursday, April 11th the MA program will host, in collaboration with Rebecca Baron from the School of Film/Video, graduate students and faculty from the European School of Visual Arts. We will meet on Thursday, April 11th, from 4-7pm at the Bijou for some screenings curated by Rebecca and her students, and for an open discussion about translation with ESVA faculty Stephen Wright and MA faculty Arne De Boever.  

 

  • CalArts' MFA Creative Writing Program is delighted to welcome Edwidge Danticat as the inaugural voice in its new writer-in-residence program. On  April 10, 2013, Danticat will give a public presentation in BB#4 on the CalArts campus from 7:30 - 9:00 PM.  We hope you can join us! Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the Pushcart Short Story Prize and a MacArthur “Genius Award," Edwidge Danticat's work focuses on Haitian and Haitian-American experiences, particularly the lives of women and their relationships.  Her eight books include Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Dew Breaker; The Farming of Bones; Brother, I’m Dying and Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Brown University and has served as a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University (from 1996 to 1997) and the University of Miami (from 2000 to 2008).
  • April 7: LA Walking Tour led by Aesthetics and Politics faculty, Norman Klein. The tour will start at 10:45 AM, at the corner of Douglas and Carroll Avenues, in Angelino Heights, with lunch at Philippe's in Chinatown. Of the tour, Klein says: “The fissures and contested spaces within this seemingly gentrified space reveal dozens of plans that went sour, dozens of events that only exist as traces today... The location allows us to box the compass, and begin to understand how power, infrastructure, race and class have evolved over the past century; and essentially where to look next.”
  • Friday, April 5th: Amanda Beech, Adrian Johnston, and Suhail Malik on "materialisms" at WHAP! Check out our WHAP! page for more info. Suhail is also giving a talk at CalArts on Tuesday, April 2nd. More info through the School of Art website. 
  • Thursday, March 21st: Ken Ehrlich on "Antagonism of the Commons". 4-7pm, Butler Building. 
  • Wednesday, March 20th: Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato at REDCAT! More info on the A&P lecture series page. 
  • Friday, March 15th: screening of Ken Ehrlich's film La Huelga at WHAP! For more info, check our WHAP! page. 
  • Thursday, March 14th: workshop with Brian Massumi and Erin Manning. At LANGLEY, from 4-7pm. More info about Brian and Erin on the TEDx website, linked in the item below.
  • Poetry Magazine has a podcast with Douglas Kearney reading one of his poems published in their March 2013 issue.
  • On March 9th, our colleagues from the Center for New Performance are hosting TEDx CalArts, on "Performance, Body, and Presence." Douglas Kearney is part of the line-up. Franco "Bifo" Berardi will be skyping in from Berlin. Our MA students are writing up responses to the conference that will be published in the event catalogue.
  • If you are in Berlin March 7th-9th, join us for The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part 2. Arne De Boever is speaking on Friday, the 8th, in response to a panel featuring Maurizio Lazzarato and Matteo Pasquinelli. On Saturday, March 9th the book from the first psychopathologies conference, hosted by the MA program in LA in November 2012, will be launched. On Friday, March 7th, Arne is also running a workshop about his own books at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. And one more event to attend: Dean of Critical Studies Amanda Beech is lecturing about her own work at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt on Thursday, March 6th... So a full calendar for next week!
  • Thursday, February 28th: at REDCAT, at 8:30pm: In Search of UIQ, with James Wiltgen. From the REDCAT brochure: Following the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, a work that marked a highpoint in his creative partnership with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari began working on a screenplay for a science-fiction film, Un amour d’UIQ. This script, which preoccupied Guattari’s attention for seven years, represented a blueprint for a subversive popular cinema through an imagined hyper-intelligent infra-cellular life substance—“UIQ” (Universe Infra-quark)—capable of controlling global communications networks and plugging into the “desiring machines” of a community of squatters. After discovering the unpublished script, Paris-based artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson initiated a multiform research project that culminates in their film essay In Search of UIQ, which takes on Guattari’s central quandary: how to give shape to a bodiless entity, seemingly without spatial or temporal limits.
  • Wednesday, February 27th, at WHAP!: Mady Schutzman's film Dear Comrade. Check out our WHAP! webpage for more info.
  • Talk: "What is a Paradigm? On Examples and Exceptions in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben". Monday, Febr. 25th, 12n-1:30pm, Butler Building (Cube). Leland de la Durantaye is the author of Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007) and Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009).  Alongside of his academic work he writes for Bookforum, Cabinet, The Believer, The Boston Globe, The Harvard Review, the Village Voice  and The New York Times. He is an Associate Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.
  • February 15th: Ronaldo V. Wilson at WHAP! Check out the WHAP! page for more info.
  • Thursday, February 7th: A&P visiting scholar Graham Cairns about architecture, media and politics. Part of the Commons lecture series, curated by Linette Park and Manuel Shvartzberg. 4pm, Tatum Lounge.
  • Wednesday, January 30th: Peter Gadol at WHAP! Check the WHAP lecture series page for more info.
  • On Monday, January 28th the MA program is hosting Alberto Toscano. Alberto will be giving a talk titled "Socialist Transparency and Capitalist Ventriloquism: Political Economies of Representation". Butler Building (Cube), 12n-1-30pm. Alberto teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He sits on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism and edits the Italian List for Seagull Books. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), and is currently completing a book on the aesthetics of capital with Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (forthcoming from Zero Books).
  • Welcome back! Check out the program for the Aesthetics and Politics lecture series and the WHAP! series following the links on the left. The A&P lecture series is hosted by Martín Plot and promises to immerse you in some of the most exciting political thinking and art-making today. This semester's installment of WHAP! looks like a best-of Critical Studies: with events featuring Martín Plot, James Wiltgen, Douglas Kearney Mady Schutzman, Ken Ehrlich, Amanda Beech, and some of our alumns, the series includes debates about politics, lliterature, architecture, urban design, as well as film-screenings... 
Posted by adeboever on Wed, 01/09/2013 - 9:30am

Fall 2012

  • From Janet Sarbanes, director of the MFA writing program: I'm pleased to announce that the Writing Program will be co-sponsoring the 2013 EMP.LA Pop Music Conference, which will take place from April 19-20th at USC and REDCAT. This is a really lively conference that includes not only cultural studies scholars and musicologists, but music writers, musicians and fans. The preferred deadline for proposals is December 21st. The theme is "Locals Only" but you are not required to write about LA, just encouraged to think about music and location. 
  • Last WHAP! event of the year, this Friday, December 7th. Hosted by Douglas Kearney, with Kate Durbin, Ernest Hardy, and Tisa Bryant. More info on our WHAP! lecture series page... 
  • Coming up: The first SPRAWL event of the year will take place on Wednesday, November 28 at 7:30pm in The Cube (BB #4)! This is an open mic event. MFA1's and 2's in the Writing, Writing for Performance, and Aesthetics and Politics programs are invited to share original work and hear what their peers have been working on, all while enjoying some adult beverages (read: there will be a bartender) and FOOD. Really, what could be more delightful? Nothing. We want to hear poems, short stories, excerpts of longer pieces, plays, songs, musical instruments-- whatever you've got, we're not picky. Just keep it under 10 minutes for the first round, please!
  • From Linette and Manuel: "The Commons", with Amanda Beech (Dean of Critical Studies), on Thursday, November 15 at 4pm in Tatum Lounge. The title of Amanda’s presentation will be Statecraft. Amanda Beech’s work in video, sculpture, drawing and writing investigates the condition of contingency and its manifestation in scientific, political, literary and philosophical paradigms that include: noir-ish narratives of TV shows like 24, CSI and real political events. Her work includes the solo shows Sanity Assassin, Spike Island, Bristol with the publication of the same name (Urbanomic, 2010); The Church, The Bank, The Art Gallery, Banner Repeater, London, 2012; and she has upcoming solo projects at Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry, UK and HaGamle Prestagard, Stavanger, Norway. Group shows include: The Real Thing, Tate Britain, (2010); Greetings Comrades the Image Has Now Changed its Status, Occular Lab, Melbourne (2009), and Commonwealth, MGK127, Toronto, (2009).
  • Join us Fri. Nov. 9th-Sun. Nov. 11th for: The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One. Hosted by Arne De Boever (MA Aesthetics and Politics program, CalArts), Warren Neidich (Delft school of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture), and Jason Smith (Art Center). The conference begins on Friday, November 9th, 7:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institute (5750 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles) with a keynote address by Franco “Bifo” Berardi (introduced by Sylvère Lotringer) and continues on Saturday, November 10th and Sunday, November 11th beginning at 10:00 a.m. at the West Hollywood Public Library (626 N. San Vicente Boulevard, Los Angeles). Speakers will include: Jonathan Beller, Jodi Dean, Tiziana Terranova, Patricia Pisters, and Bruce Wexler. No registration is required and the public is invited for free. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part 2 will be held at the ICI-Berlin, March 8-10, 2013. More info on our conferences page. 
  • Global studies alert (2): Film at REDCAT & The School of Film/Video in collaboration with Intercultural Arts Project Committee (ICAP), The Office of the Provost & The MA Aesthetics and Politics Program proudly present: 3 screenings/presentations by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Join us Wed. Nov. 7th, 8:30 pm at REDCAT for Surname Viet, Given Name Nam; Thu. Nov. 8th, 7:00 pm at CalArts, Bijou Auditorium for Shoot for the Contents; and Fri. Nov. 9th, 4:00 pm at CalArts, Bijou Auditorium for Naked Spaces - Living is Round. Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer and composer. She has traveled and lectured extensively—in the States, as well as in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand—on film, art, feminism, and cultural politics. She taught at the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal; at universities such as Cornell, San Francisco State, Smith, Harvard, Ochanomizu (Tokyo), Ritsumeikan (Kyoto), Dongguk (Seoul); and is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. 
  • Global studies alert (1): James L. Gelvin, Professor of Middle Eastern History at UCLA, author of the recent book, The Arab Uprising: What Everyone Needs to Know, will come speak on Wednesday Nov. 7th at CalArts, in the context of MA faculty Chandra Khan’s “Nonviolent Social Movements” course. We will meet in Langley from 2-3:15 pm. The title of Professor Gelvin's talk will be: "The Arab Uprisings: What We Have Learned After Two Years."
  • From our friends in the MFA writing progam: On Saturday October 27th, you'll have the opportunity to hear readings by six different conceptual women writers at three different alternative art venues in Chinatown Los Angeles.  Audience members are invited to choose the order in which they experience this “distributed” book launch.  Co-sponsored by the CalArts MFA Writing Program and Les Figues Press, Some Assembly Required celebrates the exciting new anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (Les Figues 2012), which features work by 64 writers from 10 countries, including CalArts faculty members Jen Hofer and Christine Wertheim.


  • Check out the interview with MA faculty Norman Klein in the Los Angeles Review of Books! 
  • For those of you who are interested in speculative realism/ materialism: Armen Avanessian will be giving a talk on Tuesday, October 23rd, titled "Speculative Poetics: Introduction to a Work in Progress." We'll meet at 12n, in the Butler Building (Cube). Born in Vienna, Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna, and in Paris with Jacques Rancière. After completing his dissertation in literature, “Phenomenology of the Ironic Intellect: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics of Modernity,” he worked as a freelance journalist and editor (at Le Philosophoire) in Paris, and then in publishing in London. In 2007, he returned to academia to begin his current position as a researcher at the "Collaborative Research Center 626: Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits,” at the Free University Berlin. In 2011, he was a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University.

 

  • MA program alumn Shoghig Halajian is curating Nothing is forgotten, some things considered, which opens at UKS in Oslo this Friday, October 19th. The group show includes work by MA alumn Jumana Manna (in collaboration with MA faculty Norman Klein). Nothing is forgotten, some things considered explores the politics of image-making and its impact on individual and collective identity. At a moment when the dominance of neoliberalism and its attending crisis questions the smooth image of corporate capitalism, the exhibition brings together artists who challenge dominant modes of representation within historical and political discourses. It investigates the multifarious sites of power that construct identity, ranging from national archives to media coverage of protest, and consequently presents a generative tension between ideology and experience. Contributors include: Liz Glynn with Mark Allen, William E. Jones, Raimundas Malašauskas with Valentinas Klimašauskas, Jumana Manna with Norman Klein and Rana Issa, Laure Prouvost, Christine Rebet, Emily Roysdon and Wu Tsang with Roya Rastegar.
  • Linette Park and Manuel Shvartzberg are continuing their “Commons” lecture series (formerly known as Theory Tuesdays) with Gala Porras-Kim. Gala Porras-Kim was born in Bogotá, Colombia and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BA from UCLA (2007), her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2009), and she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010). Her work has been included in exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA; La Central, Bogotá, Colombia; FOXRIVER, Singapore, Singapore; Dobaebacsa HQ, Seoul, Korea, and most recently at 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, CA. Her most recent project includes notes that led to the production of the LP Whistling and Language Transfiguration, which uses the tonal qualities of the Zapotec language to translate stories of the Tlacolula Valley in Oaxaca into its whistled form. The artist will discuss objects resulting from her research into the Zapotec culture and politics, its tonal language, and the variations of dialects contained within the region, as well as whistling used as the hidden transcript and a strategy of dissent. Thursday, October 18th, 4pm at Tatum Lounge. 
  • The new journal ARCHITECTURE_Media_Politics_Society publishes a paper by Manuel Shvartzberg. The paper was written while Manuel was a student in the MA program. 
  • On Tuesday, October 2nd, we are screening François Lagarde's new documentary film Simondon of the Desert as part of WHAP! This will be the US premiere of the film. The director will be present to discuss the film with us afterwards. Read more about it on the 24700 blog. 
  • On Sunday, September 30th, we continue our collaboration with the City of West Hollywood at the West Hollywood book fair. Douglas Kearney will be reading from his work from 12:45-1:45pm on the Poetry Corner stage. Martín Plot will be moderating a panel titled "State of the Union", featuring Nancy L. Cohen, Paddy Hirsch, Robert Scheer, and Mel White (Park Stage, 1-2pm).
  • Tomorrow, at 6pm, Martín Plot's contemporary political thought course is hosting Avery Gordon. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara and Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and Body Politics. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and over the last several years, she has been writing about imprisonment, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. Gordon has co-hosted “No Alibis,” a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB 91.9 FM Santa Barbara. In collaboration with the School of Art. 


  • From our friends at UC Irvine: Being Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy, 1980-2010--held at UAG, University of California Irvine. The show is up until November 20.
  • This Thursday, September 20th @ 7pm, three graduating MA students--Linette Park, Manuel Shvartzberg, and Seth Stewart--will present their theses in the library. Please join us in celebrating their work! Topics will range from the Occupy Movement, to the concept of radicality in art and architecture, to dandyism and the care of the self. Coffee, tea, and snacks will be served. 
  • The MA Aesthetics and Politics program returns to West Hollywood for WHAP!, a year-long series of lectures and events. This Friday, September 21st, Martín Plot will be hosting author, historian, civic leader and political commentator Nancy Cohen and West Hollywood councilmember John Duran for a conversation about electoral politics and the fight for equality. The conversation will take place in the library community room (upstairs), from 7:30-9pm. All of our events are free and open to the public. Pay parking is available in the library structure, and we'll validate your parking ticket for you. For more information about the other events we have lined up for the semester, please go to our website.
  • MA-program orientation: Thursday, September 6th, at 1pm, in room D-206. Come and hang out with the faculty and your fellow students, and meet our new dean, associate dean, and the administrative staff!  
Posted by adeboever on Mon, 09/03/2012 - 9:00am

Summer 2012

  • For those of you who are enrolling for courses: the list of Fall electives has now been posted on our electives page. Core course descriptions have also been updated... 
  • We are delighted to announce that Rita Gonzalez, Associate Curator in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will be our Visiting Faculty for the Fall 2012 semester. Rita's course (the Fall 2012 Aesthetics and Politics lecture series seminar) will explore current conversations and debates driving the contemporary art curatorial field. More info to be posted on our Visiting Faculty page soon. 
  • In the Fall of 2012, the MA program is starting a collaboration with the internationally known French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler, a recent visitor to the program. Within the framework of the New Industrial World Forum held annually at Centre Pompidou for the last 5 years, Stiegler's Institute for Research and Innovation will dedicate the upcoming 2012 forum to the question of Digital Studies. We were invited to contribute to "a public and international scientific debate on the status of digital technologies in contemporary societies and those societies to come.” 
  • As part of the digital studies-initiative (see previous item), and in conjunction with the 2012-2013 WHAP! lecture series, we will host from Friday, November 9th until Sunday, November 11th a conference on “The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One” at the Goethe-Institute and at the West Hollywood public library. Featured speakers include: Jonathan Beller, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Jodi Dean, Patricia Pisters, Tiziana Terranova, Bruce Wexler. The conference will include a graduate student panel. The second part of the conference will take place at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, in March 2013. In collaboration with Warren Neidich and Jason Smith.
  • With designer and CalArts student Armando Martinez-Celiz, Douglas Kearney and Arne De Boever have been putting together the first MA-program publication: an anthology of student writings titled In/Form. The volume, which will become part of a yearly series, will be launched in September, during our yearly thesis reading event (hosted by Brena Smith).
  • Theory Tuesdays becomes Theory Thursdays: MA-candidates Linette Park and Manuel Shvartzberg will curate a year-long series of reflections on "The Commons". Meetings will take place on selected Thursday afternoons, between 4-7pm. CalArts has recently set aside this time as a 3-hour period during which no classes are scheduled and interdisciplinary work between students from different schools can happen. "The Commons" is launched as the MA students' contribution to this exciting new intiative.
  • WHAP!, or the West Hollywood Aesthetics and Politics lecture series, will continue in 2012-2013 with a year-long line-up of debates, film screenings, and other events. Check out the series' webpage in early September for a list of what will be on offer.
  • François Lagarde's documentary film Simondon of the Desert (with Arne De Boever) was selected (hors compétition) for the International Festival of Documentary Film in Marseilles. The film, which revolves around the enigmatic French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, will be screened--with English subtitles--on Tuesday, October 2nd as part of the West Hollywood lecture series. More info, including a trailer, here (French required...).

Posted by adeboever on Wed, 08/01/2012 - 10:00am

Spring 2012

  • Congratulations to the 2010-2011 MA-candidates who are graduating today! Come join us for the party at CalArts... and have a great Summer! 
  • In theaters this Summer: Heidi Smith's animated feature ParaNorman. Heidi was a student of Norman Klein's at CalArts, and the character of Norman in the film is partly based on him. Trailer below.

  • Join us on Wednesday, May 9th for the book launch of CELL, a collection of essays and fiction created out of the Body Cluster courses from the Fall 2011 semester. The books will be available and free to take! There will be a few brief readings from the publication, as well as discussion of the Body Cluster and the work it inspired to create. Refreshments and snacks will round out your bodily experience. Time: 7-9 PM. Location: Butler Building 4 (Cube).
  • On Friday, May 4th, MA candidates Geoff Derven and Manuel Shvartzberg will be presenting their work at "Principles of Uncertainty", an interdisciplinary conference on Critical Theory hosted by the Comparative Literature Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Manuel's paper is titled "The Uncertain Architecture of Democracy" and Geoff's is called "Beyond Interpretation?". They are presenting on the panel, "Art and Aesthetics", moderated by Professor Nico Israel. The panel will go from 9:30-11am, and will be held in room 8402. Come join the conversation if you're in New York!
  • On Friday, May 4th we are hosting the last WHAP! event for this academic year. Architect Ric Abramson and MA faculty Norman Klein will be discussing the future of West Hollywood, in a conversation moderated by MA program alumn and West Hollywood city councilmember John D'Amico. More info on our WHAP! page. 
  • MA faculty Douglas Kearney talks to Melissa F. Alvarado on blogtalkradio. Tune into the conversation here. 
  • Theory Tuesdays closes on April 24th with a performance piece by artist Warren Neidich: The Noologist's Handbook. We'll start at 12n, and go until 1:30pm. Pizza and soda will be served. Bring three objects that are meaningful to you... All are welcome!
  • On April 17th, the MA program and the Herb Alpert School of Music are hosting French philosopher François Noudelmann as part of the Theory Tuesdays forum. François will present material from his recently translated book The Philosopher's Touch, which deals with Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the piano. We'll be meeting in the Butler Building (Cube), from 12n-1:30pm. Pizza and soda will be served.


  • MA faculty and program founder Martín Plot just published "Our Element: Flesh and Democracy in Merleau-Ponty" in Continental Philosophy Review and "Lefort and the Question of Democracy--In America" in Constellations. Last week, he delivered the academic year's "Inaugural Lecture" at IDAES/UNSAM in Argentina: "Political Theology, Political Aesthetics".
  • Theory Tuesdays continues, on Tuesday April 10th, with Stathis Gourgouris. Stathis' talk will be entitled: "Archè and Infinity of a Political Cosmos." Stathis Gourgouris received his PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA in 1990. He has published two books: Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford UP, 1996) and Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford UP, 2003). He is also a poet, with three books of poetry in Greek, and many poems published in English in anthologies and journals such as Harvard Review, Jacaranda Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Compages, and the LA Weekly. As usual, we'll meet in the Butler Building (Cube), at 12n. Pizza and soda will be served.

 

  • MA-candidate Manuel Shvartzberg is presenting a paper titled "The Architecture of Radicality: Between Soft and Hard Institutions" on April 7th at the UCSD "New Institutions" conference. Grant Kester will be the respondent for his panel. 
  • Double WHAP! in the first week after Spring break: on Tuesday, April 3rd, Catherine Malabou will be speaking at the West Hollywood library. We'll meet there again on Friday, April 6th, for a screening of two films by Érik Bullot. Arne De Boever and Critical Studies' resident biologist Mike Bryant will be responding to Malabou's talk; on Friday, we'll be joined by Rebecca Baron (Film/Video) and Jon Nelson-Wagner (MFA writing) for conversation after the screening. Rebecca Baron's film The Idea of North will be on the bill as well...

 

  • MA-candidate Linette Park is curating this week's Theory Tuesdays: Please join us for a double-serving on March 20th with MA faculty Douglas Kearney and Music faculty Michael Pisaro, whose elective courses have wowed MA students over the years. They will offer presentations about the cut and the pocket found in music, the "mess," and aesthetics--along with a close-listening of Dilla's "Donuts." The presentations will held at the Butler Building from 12-1:30pm. Pizza and soda will be provided. 
  • Theory Tuesdays, on March 13th, with MA in Aesthetics and Politics visiting scholar Birk Weiberg. The title of Birk's talk will be: "Aesthetics and Techniques of Cinematic Composite Images". We'll be meeting in the Butler Building (Cube), at 12n. Pizza and soda will be served. All welcome!
  • Join us for a conversation with political thinker Étienne Balibar this Friday, at the new West Hollywood library! The topic of Étienne's talk will be the relation between the political and the religious. For more info, see our WHAP! page. Below, CalArts students Geoff Derven (MA) and Jamie Pea (BFA) at WHAP! 

 

  • We're having a theory tuesdays on February 28th (12n, Butler Building/Cube) with Jaspar Joseph-Lester from Sheffield-Hallam university in the UK. Jaspar will be presenting some of his own work; he'll also be introducing the practice-based PhD program at Sheffield-Hallam with which we began to collaborate last year. As usual, pizza and soda will be provided. Below, the cover of the new Transmissions Annual, titled Provocation, and edited by Jaspar. 


  • On February 25th, MA program alumn Claudia Slanar will be presenting her work on a panel on feminist art education today: What is the value of feminist arts pedagogy today? In the years since Judy Chicago initiated the first Feminist Art Program in 1970, women students have called for their own opportunities to define and discuss their relationship to feminism. At CalArts, twice in the past 15 years, students have unearthed the documents of the Feminist Art Program, and organized symposia to convene multiple feminist generations for discussion. What do current scholarship and art practices reflect, regarding feminism? Is there a need for women-only studio classes? In addition to a lively discussion of these questions, we will screen “Define,” a video meditation on the semiotics of ethnic female identity by O.Funmilayo Makarah, and scholar Claudia Slanar will deliver an illustrated lecture on previously undiscovered 1970s feminist works.
  • This Wednesday, February 22nd, MA in Aesthetics and Politics Visiting Faculty Kate Elswit is hosting theatre and performance scholar Nicholas Ridout for a conversation about theatre and politics today. We will be meeting at the West Hollywood library, at 7pm. For more info, check out our WHAP! page. 
  • On Thursday February 16th, the MA program and the Film Directing Program will be screening Dominique Deruddere's film Everybody's Famous!, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2000. Dominique will join us for a Q&A at the Bijou after the screening. For details, check the schedule outside of the Bijou... 

  • From Chandra Khan: Wednesday February 1, 3:30--5:00 PM, CalArts Main Gallery: A Forum on Violence Against Women. This Dynamic Forum will present multiple perspectives on Issues of violence against women, highlighting mass rapes in militarized zones and grassroots efforts to end violence against women. Presented as part of the Collaborative course cluster, “Women, Community Engagement, Resistance and Transdisciplinary Activism.” This Calarts event is part of  Getty Pacific Standard Time events throughout Southern California. For this event, we will be working with artist Suzanne Lacy.
  • Welcome back everyone! First theory tuesdays of the semester will be on Tuesday, January 24th, with MA program visiting faculty Kate Elswit. The title of Kate's talk will be: "Watching After Weimar: Dance's Intellectual Property and the Protection of Memory". As usual, we will be meeting in the Cube, from 12n-1:30pm. Pizza and soda will be served.

 

  • Out now, with Edinburgh University Press: Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, co-edited by Arne De Boever. This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon's thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem. The work on the cover is by artist Phil Ross, who spoke at our bioart event last year. 

  • From our friends at UCLA: on Monday Feb. 27, from 4-6pm, in Royce 306, Martin Treml (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin) will be giving a talk entitled “Paulinian Enmity: A story of the correspondence(s) of Jacob Taubes & Carl Schmitt.”
  • From Tom Leeser: In the political hotbed of the 1970s, some artists merged their practice in video or film with their political concerns in an explicit manner, and these artworks play with basic elements of media creation and perception. This screening includes Vicarious Thrills (Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren, 1979), restored print from the Academy Film Archive, and Opposing Views (Tom Leeser, 1980). Dangerous Ideas: Political Conceptual Work in Los Angeles, 1974-1981. On Sunday, January 8th, 3pm, at MOCA (Ahmanson Auditorium). 
  • Check out Adam Berg’s upcoming show Endangered Spaces at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, from January 14th until February 25th.

Posted by adeboever on Sat, 01/07/2012 - 12:30pm

Fall 2011

  • Last Aesthetics and Politics lecture series event for the semester: Douglas Kearney is hosting Sianne Ngai, who will be giving a talk titled "The Zany Science." For more info, check the lecture series webpage.


  • From faculty member Chandra Khan: The UAM, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), will mount Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, a survey of the press’ work and their connections to artist collectives of the time. Founded in 1967 by a unique group of L.A. activist-artists who created an “alternate everything” printing and publishing business, the Peace Press (1967-1987) emerged from the tangle of progressive political and alternative groups that flourished during the decades between 1960 and 1990. The poster archive, now housed at the CSPG in Los Angeles, exemplifies an important element of visual and cultural history: art that reflects the desire and intention to create social and political change, as well as artists who attempt to affect change through both their work and their actions. For more info, check here. 
  • Last WHAP! event for the semester: this Friday, december 2nd, at the West Hollywood library, Frédéric Neyrat will be speaking about vocabularies and images of catastrophe. For more information, please consult our WHAP! webpage. 
  • Join us for a conversation on sustaining a creative practice in a condition of collapse: on Monday, 11/21, from 7-9pm, in C-108 (Center for Integrated Media). With Arne De Boever, Anne-Marie Oliver (PNCA), Norman Klein, and Tom Leeser (Art and Technology). Video of the event now available here. 


  • Out now: Parrhesia 12! The issue includes a special dossier on Jean-François Lyotard's Discourse, Figure, a feature essay by Eugene Thacker titled "Dark Life," and an article by Joseph Tanke on the work of Jacques Rancière. Edited by Arne De Boever, Parrhesia is an open access journal published by the Open Humanities Press. 
  • "Why is contemporary art addicted to violence?" That is the title of the New York Times' review of Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty. Join us on Friday, November 18th for the third West Hollywood Aesthetics and Politics lecture series event: Maggie will be reading from her book, and the reading will be followed by a discussion with the audience. All are welcome!


  • On Thursday, November 17th, the body cluster is hosting Belgian film director Michaël Roskam. Roskam's award-winning feature film Bullhead will be screening at the Bijou, starting at 1pm. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director.


  • Two of MA alumn Taras Matla's recent works are featured in See Line Gallery's exhibition Ground Control. Join us at the Pacific Design Center from 5-8pm on Thursday, November 17th for the opening.
  • Aesthetics and Politics lecture series, with Kyla Wazana Tompkins: "Eating the Other, and the Other Eating". Join us at CalArts for the third event in Douglas Kearney's Fall 2011 lecture series. Location: Langley. Time: 7:30-9pm.


  • Third theory tuesdays of the semester, with Andrea Fontenot. The title for Andrea's talk is: "Deeply Superficial": Affect and Collectivity on the Surface. In response to accusations of the superficiality of his work, Warhol once famously proclaimed: "I am deeply superficial." This talk takes Warhol's quip--and the play with surfaces in his work, especially Screen Tests--as a lens through which to explore recent theoretical developments in the humanities that turn away from interpretation as the primary activity of criticism, with particular attention to the practice of surface reading in contemporary queer cultural studies. Location: Butler Building (cube). Time: From 12n-1pm. Pizza and soda will be served.
  • Several MA faculty (core and elective) are involved in the Los Angeles Review of Books, as authors and/or editors. The LARB is a new, Los Angeles based publication that brings together many of our program's interests. Follow the review online, or through its epubs.

 

  • Last year, Bernard Stiegler visited the MA program and gave a talk titled "The Proletarianization of Sensibility." The talk, translated by Arne De Boever, is now out in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Bernard's visit was organized with the help of our friends at UCLA and UC Irvine, Kenneth Reinhard and Stephen Barker. 



  • Tuesday, November 1st, 12n-1:30pm: second Theory Tuesdays of the semester, with French philosopher Frédéric Worms. The title of Frédéric's talk will be "Care as an orientation in the present time." Location: Butler Building, Cube. Open to MA and MFA students. Pizza and soda will be served. 
  • For students pursuing the global studies concentration: on Monday, October 31st, Vandana Shiva is speaking at Cal Poly Pomona on "Hunger in an Age of Plenty."  More info on the website of the Ahimsa center. 
  • From our friends at USC, for students pursuing the global studies concentration: The Department of French and Italian of the University of Southern California is pleased to announce a one-day symposium marking the fifty-year anniversary of October 17, 1961. On that date, thousands of Algerians demonstrated peacefully in the streets of Paris to protest a curfew imposed upon them in the last days of the Algerian war; dozens if not hundreds were killed in the police crackdown that ensued. Scholars and artists from France, Algeria, and the United States will discuss the history, representation, and legacy of this event. 
  • Join us in the Occupy Wall Street movement today!


  • WHAP!, our brand-new West Hollywood lecture series, starts this Friday, October 14th, with a conversation on street art. Speakers will be the fabulous Sam Durant from CalArts' School of Art, graffiti artist Marquis Lewis (RETNA), and MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch. For more info, please consult our lecture series webpage. 


  • MA program alumn Nate Schulman gave a lecture and workshop at USC entitled "Getting Graphic: A Lecture and Workshop on the History of Graphic Design in Queer Activism." The slideshow for his talk is below. 

  • Tuesday October 4th: first lecture in the Fall 2011 Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series! Ernest Hardy will be speaking about "Post Post-Blackness/Queerness in the Visionary 90s". More info here. 

  • On Wednesday, October 5th the Body Cluster will be hosting Ed Cohen. Ed will be giving a talk entitled "Appreciate Your Genius" in the Butler Building (BB#4) at 7pm. Here's a sneak preview of a video project that Ed is working on with Ardele Lister:
  • REDCAT presents: Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako: more more more… future, Wed. Oct. 5 – Sat. Oct. 8, featuring legendary Kinshasa guitarist Flamme Kapaya. more, more, more... future is akin to a live rock concert with a full band accompanying three agile male dancers. Exceptional guitarist, Flamme Kapaya, inserts into the spirit of Congolese pop a hefty dose of punk range and extraordinary energy as a passionate response to Congo’s legacy of war, terror and economic collapse. “To be positive is the most subversive,” Linyekula writes. “Celebrating is a way of resisting.”
  • CalArts Plays Itself opens tomorrow at PACT (Zeche Zollverein) in Essen, Germany. The image below is a still from MA-candidate Jumana Manna's work Coach. 

  • First Theory Tuesdays coming up, with Spring 2011 visiting scholar Christian Hite: on Tuesday, September 20th, from 12n-1:30pm, in the Butler Building (Cube). Pizza and soda will be served. Open to MA and MFA students as well as faculty. 

  • Register for one or two courses in the interdisciplinary course cluster--Arne De Boever's Contemporary Aesthetic Theory (core course) or Maggie Nelson's class on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (elective)--and contribute some of your writing to the book that will be designed in Gail Swanlund's BFA class...   

  • Orientation: We will be meeting on Thursday, September 8th from 1-4pm in room D206 for a quick and informal introduction to the program, the curriculum, the core and elective classes, as well as the various events we have lined up for the semester. Around 3pm, we will relocate to the Butler Building for a late lunch with the incoming MFA writing students. At 3:45pm, Alecia Menzano will join us for a brief introduction to the computer lab. Enjoy the last days of the Summer... 
Posted by adeboever on Sat, 09/03/2011 - 8:30am

Summer 2011

  • At the invitation of alumn John D'Amico, now a West Hollywood councilmember, the MA program is launching a brand-new lecture series at the new West Hollywood library. For more information, check out the WHAP! lecture series page. 
  • The line-up for Douglas Kearney's Fall 2011 Aesthetics and Politics lecture series has been posted on our A&P lecture series page. 
  • Fall 2011 Theory Tuesdays: with Spring 2011 visiting scholar Christian Hite (09/20), French philosopher Frédéric Worms (11/01; see image), and Critical Studies faculty Andrea Fontenot (11/15). 

 

  • From September 29th-October 2nd, CalArts will be holding a festival at PACT Zollverein in Essen, Germany. MA-candidate Jumana Manna's film "Untitled (Coach)" will be included in the program, which is part of the prestigious Ruhrtriennale. With Stefan Hilterhaus, PACT's artistic director, Arne De Boever will be curating an art/theory symposium featuring Irit Rogoff and Jalal Toufic. More info about the full program here.


  

  • Norman Klein lectured at PNCA about "The Dismantling of the American Psyche". 
  • Alumnus Nick Benacerraf's the Assembly Theatre Project has a new show about the Weather Underground, which was also Nick's thesis topic: "Disgusted by the Vietnam War and the government's repression of those seeking equality domestically, a handful of leaders from the 1960s student movement seized control of Students for a Democratic Society and reshaped it in the name of overthrowing the United States government. Believing violence is the only means to a true and lasting peace, these passionate and brilliant idealists accelerated a movement to its fervor, but left a country behind. home/sick explores the legendary Weather Underground's inspiration and idealism, infighting and ultimate disintegration, in a passionate examination of collective action." Go see it!


  • From our friend Joanna Demers at USC: Evental Aesthetics is a new international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives on art and aesthetics. The journal's inaugural issue will be dedicated to Hegelian Topics in Aesthetics.
  • Primitive Accumulation, curated by Dan Davis and Arne De Boever, was up at Fold Gallery in London from May 28th until July 7th.


  • On June 4th-5th, our friends Kenneth Reinhard and Drew Daniel are curating a conference titled "Can Art and Politics be Thought?" at the Hammer Museum. The event is co-sponsored by the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics and will feature CalArts' Allan Sekula. Other speakers include Alain Badiou, Matthew Barney, Lauren Berlant, Joan Copjec, and Joshua Clover. 



Posted by adeboever on Tue, 07/05/2011 - 11:29am

Spring 2011

  • On May 16th-18th, Érik Bullot from the European School of Visual Arts will be visiting CalArts. He will be accompanied by four talented young filmmakers who are currently enrolled in the school's postgraduate degree. There will be an informal lunch meeting between Érik's students and our MA-candidates on Wednesday, May 18th, from 12n-1:30pm, in the Butler Building (Cube). This should be an excellent opportunity to exchange some thoughts about the state of art practice, critical theory, and (aesthetic) education today.
  • Martín Plot's new book Indivisible: Democracia y terror en tiempos de Bush y Obama will be published very soon. A fragment of the book cover (proofs) is posted below. 


  • The last Theory Tuesdays of the semester... with the fabulous Douglas Kearney, author of The Black Automaton! The title of Douglas' talk will be "Be Real Black For Me: Aesthetics and, Perhaps, Syntax". To accommodate other end-of-the-semester activities, we've had to move this meeting to Thursday, April 28th. We will be meeting in the seminar room in the Butler building from 12n-1:00pm. Pizza and soda will be provided.

  • On Tuesday April 19th, Ananya Chatterjea will be visiting the MA program. Students will get a chance to meet with her at 6pm, and the public lecture will be at 7pm, at Langley.  Ananya is Associate Professor and Director of Dance at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She envisions her work in the field of dance as a “call to action” with a focus on the bodily production of knowledge. Her most recently completed choreographic project is Kshoy! Decay!, which launches a quartet of works exploring how women in global communities of color experience and resist violence. She is the author of Butting out! Reading cultural politics in the work of Chandralekha and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and other essays published in the anthology Worlding Dance, and Celebrating India: Dance and Performance.  
  • French philosopher Bernard Stiegler will give a public lecture at CalArts (Langley) on Tuesday, April 12th, at 7:30pm. There will be an informal meeting with the MA students before the lecture. During the same week, Bernard will also give talks at UC Irvine (April 13th) and UCLA (April 14th). If you don't know Bernard's work, here are two good places to start: The Ister and Ars Industrialis. More info here. 
  • On Tuesday, March 22nd, Norman Klein will be speaking at Theory Tuesdays. The title of his talk is: "The Dismantling of the American Psyche: Notes on Its History, and an Update." From 12n-1:30pm, in the Butler Building (Cube). Open to MA/MFA students and faculty. Here's a clip of Norman talking about scripted spaces while he was at PNCA earlier this academic year:

 

  • The new issue of Parrhesia, including an essay by Jacques Rancière on photography, is out now! 
  • On Thursday, March 17th Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is giving the second lecture in the Spring 2011 Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series. The lecture is titled "Double Bind of Translation" and will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Ahmanson Auditorium, at 6pm. This event is free and open to the public. Seating will be on a first come first serve basis. For more information, please consult our lecture series page.
  • Our friends in the Graduate Studies in Art Department at Art Center College of Design are hosting an international conference on the work of Jacques Rancière, on March 11 and 12, 2011. The theme will be that of “Aesthetic Education,” a philosophical and political program first proposed by Friedrich Schiller in the last decade of the 18th century and the subject of Rancière’s recent innovative work on the relation between aesthetics and politics. Aesthetics and Politics faculty members Martín Plot and Arne De Boever are both presenting their work.
  • Save the date: Thursday, March 10th, at REDCAT: CalArts faculty member Sam Durant will introduce a screening and discussion of Cointelpro 101, a film that exposes illegal surveillance, disruption, and outright murder committed by the US government in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Cointelpro refers to the official FBI COunter INTELigence PROgramcarried out to surveil, imprison, and eliminate leaders of social justice movements and to disrupt, divide, and destroy the movements as well. Through interviews with activists who experienced these abuses first-hand, with rare historical footage, the film provides an educational introduction to a period of intense repression and draws relevant lessons for the present and future. A discussion follows the screening with filmmaker Claude Marks of the Freedom Archives, SF8 defendant and organizer Hank Jones, legendary author and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, moderated by Martín Plot. The event is co-organized by the Aesthetics and Politics Program and the School of Art.
  • Theory Tuesdays: On Tuesday, February 22nd, Dean of Critical Studies Nancy Wood will be speaking about "Photography and the Archive." From 12n-1:30pm, in the Butler Building (Cube). Open to MA/MFA students and faculty.
  • On Thursday, February 17th, cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen will be visiting the program in the context of Arne De Boever's MA Thesis Seminar and James Wiltgen's class on capitalism. Diederichsen is one of Europe's most important critics working in the field of aesthetics and politics today.

  • The MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics seeks applicants for a one-semester appointment as a Visiting Faculty during either the Fall 2011 or the Spring 2012 semester. For more info, see our Visiting Faculty page. 
  • On Tuesday, February 8th, at Langley, at 7:30pm, Ali Behdad is giving the first lecture in the Spring 2011 Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series. Ali is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Chair of English Department at UCLA. He has published widely on a broad range of topics, including travel, immigration, and Orientalist photography. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Duke 1995) and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Duke, 2005). He is currently completing a manuscript on Orientalist Photography in the 19th century. His talk is titled "The Orientalist Photograph". All are welcome!
  • On Tuesday, January 25th, Butler Building (Cube), 12n-1:30pm: Theory Tuesdays, with Aesthetics and Politics visiting lecturer Matthew McGarvey. The title of Matt's talk will be "The Ambient and the Dark." In his talk, Matt will define the concept "ambience" as a tissue of material collisions operating among other things as the hidden infrastructure of conscious perception. Matt’s talk will thus offer a starting point for a theory of perception rooted in the medium of perception rather than in the perceiver or the perceived, and will begin to lay out relations between the production of perception and the production of space. Open to MA and MFA students as well as MA faculty.
  • Friday, January 22nd, at 7pm: The Biotechnic Opera. With Fallen Fruit, Carribean Fragoza, and Arne De Boever. More info here.
  • The information for the Spring lecture series is up on the lecture series page. Chandra Khan will be hosting Ali Behdad (Tuesday, February 8th), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Thursday, March 17th), and Ananya Chatterjea (Tuesday, April 19th). All lectures are free and open to the public. For more info about the lecture series course, please consult the course website created by Chandra. 

  • Theory Tuesdays will continue in the Spring, with MA in Aesthetics and Politics visiting lecturer Matthew McGarvey (January 25th) and faculty members Nancy Wood (February 22nd), Norman Klein (March 22nd), and Douglas Kearney (April 26th). More info will be released as the dates are approaching.  
  • The new issue of Parrhesia, edited by Arne De Boever, is out now. The open access journal has been publishing cutting-edge work in continental philosophy since 2006. Issue 10 includes a feature essay by Catherine Malabou (and translated by Arne) on Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return.  
Posted by adeboever on Wed, 12/29/2010 - 9:26am

Fall 2010

  • This Thursday, Bonnie Honig is giving the final lecture in the Fall 2010 Aesthetics and Politics lecture series. Bonnie is a political and legal theorist who specializes in democratic and feminist theory. Her talk will be titled "Antigone, Interrupted: Greek Tragedy and the Future of Humanism." For more info, see our lecture series page.
  • Last Theory Tuesdays this Tuesday, November 16th, with Arne De Boever (Butler Building, Cube, 12n-1:30pm). The title of Arne's talk will be "Losing Face: Francis Bacon's 25th Hour." Race, gender, and class have traditionally been important categories in the critical reception of Spike Lee's films. But several of Lee's recent films practice an aesthetics of defacement that appears to draw these traditional categories of investigation into question. What might be the politics of such an aesthetics? What new questions for critical race studies, feminism, and marxism might it open up in the post-September 11 time of terror? 
  • On Tuesday November 9th, at 7:30pm, French philosopher Catherine Malabou will lecture on plasticity at Ahmanson Auditorium (MOCA, Grand Avenue). Catherine Malabou teaches philosophy at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and is Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Her work articulates the notion of plasticity at the crossroads of philosophy and neuroscience. Her publications in English include The Future of Hegel, Counterpath (with Jacques Derrida), What Should We Do With Our Brain?, and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing.
  • Catherine Malabou's lecture will be preceded by an afternoon symposium featuring Martie Haselton, Philip Ross, Anne Marie Oliver, Robert Mitchell, and Michael Pisaro. Speakers will make provocative, 15-minute statements about the crossover of science, technics, and aesthetics in their work. Presentations will be followed by a discussion with the audience. For more information and a schedule of the presentations, click here. 
  • As part of an ongoing initiative to raise awareness of CalArts students' contributions to the artistic world, CalArts is partnering with PACT Zollverein, an artistic center and presenting house located in the Ruhr region of Germany. Through this partnership, CalArts will select student work from each of its six schools to be presented in a festival that will showcase CalArts artists to the European arts community. The framework of the festival is being developed as a combination of public exhibitions and presentation by CalArts students mixed with a discursive space, co-hosted by Critical Studies faculty member Arne De Boever and PACT director Stefan Hilterhaus, where students and the public can discuss theoretical questions. A portfolio space will also be included where other work by CalArts artists can be displayed. The festival will take place at PACT and will officially run from Sept. 29 – Oct. 2, 2011. Presenters and performers will arrive in Essen on Sept. 25 and have Sept. 25 – 28 to set up their exhibitions or rehearse their performances. MA in Aesthetics and Politics students are also invited to apply. For more information, click here. Please direct inquiries about the program via email to this address.
  • On Saturday, October 30th, Martín Plot is giving a talk entitled "Lefort's Democracy in America" at the New School in New York. This talk is part of a memorial event for Claude Lefort, who passed away on October 3rd.


  • On Thursday, October 21st, Norman Klein and Arne De Boever are lecturing at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Norman's talk is entitled "Navigating Scripted Spaces: The Moving Image Since 1550"; Arne's talk deals with "The Philosophy of (Aesthetic) Education". For more info, click here and here (scroll down to the bottom of the page). 
Posted by adeboever on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 1:00pm

Spring-Summer 2010

Posted by cziemba on Thu, 08/12/2010 - 10:51am
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