the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Marc Handelman
Sustainability Report: Some Thoughts on an Outmoded Genre
This lecture took place on October 13th, 2011 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
Marc Handelman will discuss the strange afterlife of the genre of landscape as it continues to resurface along the broader horizon of image culture. A range of representational idioms of nature and landscape today are re-examined in Handelman’s work, returned to and reconsidered in light of their now unfamiliar, if improper medium, and in new and sometimes unrecognizable forms. Considering a range of projects he has worked on over the last several years, Handelman will discuss how painting might approach the image as a force that rends it, but also one that problematically reassembles its affects. Landscape as such, far from being the mere and hollowed appearance of former identifications of the subject, the state and the corporation is discussed as the ongoing assembly of political order, “without due process.” Handelman will address why “Nature” is never what’s at stake in its representational infighting, and how painting’s stubborn tendency towards dissimulation, and the material, reorient relations to the visual.
About Marc Handelman
Marc Handelman is an artist working and living in New York. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in Art History, the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship at Yale Norfolk and his MFA from Columbia University. He was a recent recipient of the Steeprock Arts Residency and the Awards for Artists from Printed Matter in 2011. He has exhibited throughout the United States as well as internationally in such venues as PS1 MoMA in Long Island City; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Dayton Art Institute, OH; The Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; and the Royal Academy of Art in London, UK. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY; Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Reception, Berlin, Germany. His recent artist’s book, “Archive for a Mountain,” will be published by Publication Studio in October. He is a faculty member of the painting department in the Bard MFA program, and an adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s graduate program in the School of the Arts. This year, he is a visiting lecturer at Rutgers University.