West Hollywood Lecture Series

About this series

At the request of West Hollywood Councilmember John D’Amico, who is an alumn of the MA program, Arne De Boever and Martín Plot put together a year-long lecture series at the new West Hollywood library, located at 625 N. San Vicente Boulevard.

All lectures are free and open to the public; seating is limited and will be assigned on a first come first serve basis. Pay parking is available in the library parking structure, which you can enter on San Vicente or Robertson, just north of Melrose. 

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions. 

Many thanks to Le Parc Suite Hotel for their support.  

Fall 2011

Street art

Friday, October 14th, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Reception at 9pm hosted by the Artichoke's Heart Restaurant

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and in the United States.

Born in Los Angeles, Marquis Lewis (RETNA) is a contemporary graffiti artist whose innovative style combines a mixture of mediums to create an art form that easily traverses the line between gallery art and street art. Lewis merges photography with painting by using vibrant colors and captivating images to tell stories through his artwork. His work has been featured in art galleries as well as in music videos and magazine ads. He also contributed a mural to the new West Hollywood library. 

Jeffrey Deitch is director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which recently ran the successful Art in the Streets exhibition. Deitch has been active as an art critic and exhibition curator since the mid- 1970s. Deitch’s first important curatorial project was Lives, a 1975 exhibition about artists who used their own lives as an art medium. His most ambitious exhibition was Post Human, which opened at the FAE Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lausanne in June 1992. 

A recording of the event is available here. 

Democracy in America

Friday, November 4th, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Dick Howard works on aspects of political philosophy and contemporary political thought, as well as the history of political thought. He is a frequent political commentator on French and Canadian radio and television. Among his books are The Marxian Legacy (1977), Defining the Political (1989), The Politics of Critique (1989), From Marx to Kant (1993), Political Judgments (1996) and The Specter of Democracy (2002). 

Martín Plot teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires, an M.A. from the Institute for Advanced Social Studies (UNSAM), and a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. He has published widely in the fields of social theory and political and aesthetic thought.

A recording of the event is available here. 

The Art of Cruelty

Friday, November 18th, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

This event is part of the Fall 2011 interdisciplinary course cluster The Body Cluster: Writing, Theory, Art, Design at the California Institute of the Arts.  

Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of four books of nonfiction: an acclaimed work of art and cultural criticism, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011); a meditation on the color blue, Bluets (2009); a critical study of poetry and painting, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007; winner of the Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant); and an autobiographical book about sexual violence and media spectacle, The Red Parts: A Memoir (2007; named a Notable Book of the Year by the State of Michigan). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir), Something Bright, Then Holes (2005), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001; finalist, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award). Her poetry has been widely anthologized, and included in The Best American Poetry series. 

Catastrophe politics

Friday, December 2nd, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Frédéric Neyrat is a French philosopher and former Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie (2001-2007). He has published books on the political imaginary (Fantasme de la communauté absolue, 2002); the function of images (L’image hors-l’image, 2003); globalization (Surexposés, 2005); Heidegger (L’indemne. Heidegger et la destruction du monde, 2008); the relations between eco-politics, immuno-politics and bio-politics (Biopolitique des catastrophes, 2008); and Artaud (Instructions pour une prise d’âmes. Artaud et l’envoûtement occidental).

Spring 2012

**EXTRA LECTURE** All Theatre, All the Time, Now

Wednesday, February 22nd, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Nicholas Ridout’s work is concerned primarily with a political understanding of the theatrical event as an instance of cultural production, an affective experience and a mode of social organisation.  Current projects include a book on work in modern theatre. Provisionally entitled Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love, this book takes the figure of the amateur --– understood as the person who makes theatre out of love --– as a way of developing a theoretical and historical account of the idea of community in twentieth and twenty-first century theatre and performance. 

Kate Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines cultural analysis, dance history, performance theory, German studies, and experimental practice. Before receiving her PhD in German from the University of Cambridge, she completed an MA in European Dance Theatre Practice at Laban, and undergraduate degrees in Dance and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. She came to Stanford University in 2009 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, and has taught courses listed in the departments of Drama, German Studies, Art History, and in the Dance Division. Between 2006-2009, Kate taught practical and theoretical courses in the graduate school at Laban, as well as interdisciplinary undergraduate topics at the University of Cambridge. She was also on the commission for MA Solo/Dance/Authorship, Germany’s first practice-led masters degree in dance.

Can or Ought the Political and the Religious Be Separated?

Friday, March 9th, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Etienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X-Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He has published widely in the area of Marxist philosophy and moral and political philosophy in general. His many works include Lire le Capital (1965); Spinoza et la politique (1985); Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple (2001); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); L’Europe, l’Amérique, la Guerre. Réflexions sur la mediationeuropéenne (2003); Europe, Constitution, Frontière (2005). 

Biology and politics

Tuesday, April 3rd, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Catherine Malabou teaches philosophy at Kingston University in London. 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.

Mike Bryant is a biologist and a statistician and teaches science courses in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. His research has appeared in several scientific journals: Science, Nature, American Naturalist, Ecology, PLoS, Animal Behaviour and Environmental Biology of Fishes. Mike’s research interests in biology include functional anatomy, animal behavior and life history evolution. 

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He also directs the School’s MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics. He has published numerous articles on literature, film, and critical theory and is editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. His book States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel will be published by Continuum.

Aesthetics of translation

Friday, April 6th, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Erik Bullot is a filmmaker and scholar of modern French cinema. He has made more than a dozen experimental films which have been shown in museums and festivals throughout Europe. He locates them somewhere in between the documentary and the art film. He teaches film at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges (in France).

Rebecca Baron is a filmmaker whose award-winning experimental and documentary films have been screened extensively in the US and abroad. Her film okay bye-bye was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has also worked as a documentary film editor most notably for Pennebaker and Associates. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and MFA from UC San Diego. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jon Nelson-Wagner has a PhD in Cinematic Arts from USC. He is Visiting Professor of Film Theory at USC and professor of Critical Studies at CalArts, where he is a core member of the MFA Writing Program. With Tracy Biga MacLean, he is the author of Television at the Movies: Cinematic and Critical Responses to American Broadcasting (2008). In October 2011, Jon and Tracy co-taught a seminar on the American Real in film and television at Beijing Normal University. With Lynne Goodhart, he has translated, edited, and introduced the book Fugitive Suns: Selected Poetry of Andree Chedid (1999). Their new book is tentatively titled Word Uncrucified: Sutras of the Threshold in Yves Bonnefoy and Saint John Perse. 

Constructing the Future

Friday, May 4th, 7-9pm, West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

Ric Abramson established his office, Workplays studio*architecture, in 2003. A former Fulbright scholar in Italy and Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, he divides his time between professional practice, academic research, and community involvement. His practice focuses on creative land use strategies, urban housing typologies, hybrid programs, residential hillsides and urban infill. He teaches at the USC School of Architecture.

Norman Klein is a cultural critic, and both an urban and media historian, as well as a novelist. His books include The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon, the data/cinematic novel, Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86 (DVD-ROM with book) and The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects.

John D’Amico attended CalArts in the early 80’s and went on to study business, architecture, and urban design. He returned to CalArts as a mid-career professional in the architecture and construction industry. Like the NASA Galileo Missions that use the gravity of the inner planets to gain enough velocity for their long trips to the outer planets, John returned to CalArts to help catapult himself into the future. He is now a West Hollywood councilmember.