Master’s Program in Aesthetics and Politics

Master’s Program in Aesthetics and Politics

The MA in Aesthetics and Politics program focuses on the multiplicity of ways in which the aesthetic and the political intertwine. Students work with CalArts' distinguished faculty and visiting speakers across three areas of concentration: critical theory, global studies, and media and urban studies. 

About the Program

In his essay on the work of art in the age of technical reproducibility, Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the relation between aesthetics and politics is limited by fascism on the one hand, and communism on the other. But surely there are other ways to think the connection between aesthetics and politics—not just in the past, but especially today, and with a focus on the future? Contemporary thinkers such as Claude Lefort, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Bernard Stiegler, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, Bonnie Honig, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and especially Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, have been exploring what new potentialities for politics the aesthetic might hold. 

The MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics is a site for such exploration. Situated at the heart of the nation's number #1 college for students in the arts, it provides a unique investigation of how the theoretical and the practical interact. The program should be of particular interest to artists seeking to deepen the theoretical and political elements of their art; and to BA/BFA/MFA graduates who are planning to pursue a scholarly career. Please browse this site for more information about the program’s students, its faculty, and the various courses and events that we have on offer. Contact us if you have any questions! 

Last edited by adeboever on Nov 11, 2011

News & Events

Spring 2012

  • 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 - 11:30am

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).


  • 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 - 7:30am

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 - 10:29am

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 - 8:26am

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 - 12:00pm

Spring-Summer 2010

Posted by cziemba on Thu, 08/12/2010 - 9:51am
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