the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
The Interdisciplinary Seminar was designed twelve years ago to contribute a regular and sustaining discussion on artistic practice for the students of The School of Art at The Cooper Union and the creative community that surrounds them.
The Seminar consists of two complementary parts: a weekly presentation series that is open to the entire Cooper community and its guests and an intimate meeting between the seminar’s students, the course’s faculty and the invited speakers. The weekly lecture presentations by artists, theorists, activists, designers, writers, curators, and many others involved in art, politics, and culture—create an open forum for the presentation of difficult concepts and forms and a framework to unpack the philosophical, critical, historical, and political factors that condition the context for our work.
This site contains the schedule, lecture descriptions and bios for all the lecture presentations for the semester as well as supplemental information for Cooper students who want learn more about a speaker and discover how these discussions contribute to practice.
The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Colleen Asper.
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Feb
2Claire Colebrook
Framing the End of the Species: Art in the Anthopocene Era
6:00 pm | Foundation Building Rm 215
Now that geologists have proposed that the human species’ life on the planet will be discernible as a geological strata after humans have ceased to be, we can start to pose new problems for art. How might we imagine our world once we are no longer on the planet? What does the thought of the end of our own time and life entail for figurations of life. Stephen Jay Gould argued that a more nuanced ‘iconography of life’ was required in order to understand the non-progressive and inhuman nature of evolution. I would argue that we need a new ‘iconography of life’ to understand the non-progressive and inhuman nature of humanity.
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Feb
16Stephen Sheehi
The Arab After-Image or All Photography Expresses Social Relations
6:00 pm | Foundation, Rm. 215
Prof. Sheehi re-evaluates the history of 19th century Arab photography, particularly portraiture. Many have asserted that vernacular photography, not only in Southwest Asia, seems to have participated in the self-fashioning and self-presentation of the new middle classes in turn producing new knowledge and meaning important for modernity. Contrarily, Prof. Sheehi will argue that even if the utility of the studio portrait served as a means of self-presentation, photography that was patronized, consumed and circulated by local populations did not produce or even codify new forms of knowledge or meaning during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Through its production, exchange, circulation and deployment, photographic portraiture, rather, functioned within a signification system that had already made the subject intelligible within modernity’s new social order. To put it more concisely, photographic portraiture was a performative after-effect of transformations that had already been underway for some time.