the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Video
Yates McKee
Is the Future Green? The Biopolitics of Sustainability in Contemporary Art and Design
This lecture took place on October 30th, 2007 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
Taking the recent hi-profile cultural activities surrounding Al Gore’s climate change campaign as the point of entry, this talk will address how the increasingly prominent trope of sustainability — defined by the UN in 1983 as “development that meets their own”– provides a fertile, through highly contested terrain for politicizing artistic and design activities that might go beyond the rhetoric of neo-situationist militancy so popular in the artworld today. The talk was designed to have a site-specific resonance, insofar as Cooper Union is an institution that brings together artists, architects and industrial designers, all fields that have been called upon in various ways to contribute to the so-called “Neo-Green Revolution.”
About Yates McKee
Yates Mckee is an art critic and PhD student in Art History at Columbia University. An alumnus of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and a frequent participant at 16Beaver Group, his work has appeared in publications including the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Flash Art, and October. With Michael Feher and Galle Krikorian, he co-edited the anthology Nongovernmental Politics (Zone Books:2007). Forthcoming texts include “Haunted Housing: Eco-Vaguardism, Eviction, and the Biopolitics of Sustainability in New Orleans” (Grey Room) and “Tactical Media, Sustainability, and the Rise of the Neo-Greens: From Neo-Situationism to Nongovernmental Politics” (Third Text). He currently at work co-editing an anthology for Zone books entitled the Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Politics, as well as a monographic study of the work of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla.