Lecture “The House of Dust : Against the Grain of Technology”
Graduate Center, CUNY, New York. In the context of The House of Dust exhibition at the James Gallery
October 27, 2016
Participants: Zabet Patterson, Art and Digital Media, Stony Brook University, New York; Julia Robinson, Art History, New York University; Maud Jacquin; Sébastien Pluot.
Artists of the 1960s employed chance, technology, and social interaction to create “compositions” that crossed the disciplines of music, poetry, visual art, and dance. As the decade progressed, the initial impulses and experiments coalesced as Fluxus, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. A key question of this discussion was whether it is still productive, even viable to maintain these divisions on the basis of “art movements.” Art historians Zabet Patterson and Julia Robinson discussed Fluxus practice with particular attention to the tensions of chance operations and technology and considered what the legacy of this movement is today, particularly for art’s relationship to technology.
To listen to the lecture: