The Cooper Union Interdisciplinary Seminar

the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Jennifer A. González

The Face and the Public

This lecture took place on October 7th, 2008 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Jennifer Gonzalez will focus on the use of “the face,” metaphorically and literally, as a trope for universal subjectivity and for racial particularity in contemporary digital art practice and theory. The role and the function of vision and visibility, its relation to race and the space of “the public” will be addressed through a close reading of works by contemporary artists and theorists including Mongrel, Keith Piper, Nancy Burson, Mark Hansen, Giorgio Agamben, Emannuel Levinas and Jodi Dean.

About Jennifer A. González

Jennifer A. González is Associate Professor and Chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her recently published book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT 2008) examines how artists mimetically engage the rhetoric of display found in museums, the fine arts and popular culture to critique underlying discourses of race dominance. Her writings have appeared in Frieze, Diacritics, Inscriptions, Art Journal, and Bomb. She has also contributed to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, and Race in Cyberspace. Three-time recipient of the Joanne Cassullo Teaching Fellowship, Professor Gonzalez has taught at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program since 2002.

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