The Cooper Union Interdisciplinary Seminar | We All Suffer from Light Addiction, it is the Most Modern of Diseases

the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Josiah McElheny

We All Suffer from Light Addiction, it is the Most Modern of Diseases

This lecture took place on January 28th, 2011 at 6:30 pm in the 41 Cooper Sq. Gallery (Lower Level 1) at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Josiah McElheny will discuss in detail a project that began in 2008 and continues today: an exploration of an obscure 1912 German text entitled The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies Novelette. Encompassing books, performance, film, collaborations and sculpture, he delves into the the history of utopian thinking of a distinctly satiric kind. The text was written by the little known writer Paul Scheerbart, an author who was very important to a number of influential thinkers from Walter Gropius to Walter Benjamin. McElheny will discuss works that he’s constructed to delve into the question of whether there is “a model for utopia that encompasses its own doubt, considers its own inevitable faults and failures, and sees the danger of imposing on all the plans of a subjective few.”

About Josiah McElheny

Josiah McElheny is an artist working and living in New York. He has exhibited his work at national and international venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Orchard, and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, Institut im Glaspavillon in Berlin, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, White Cube in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. He has written for Artforum and Cabinet among other publications and is a contributing editor to BOMB. Recently published monographs and artist books include Josiah McElheny: A Prism (Rizzoli, 2010), The Light Club (University of Chicago Press, 2010), A Space for an Island Universe (Turner Publications, 2009), and Island Universe (White Cube, 2008).

Relevant Links