Kategori: Archive

Thursday 14 April 2011, at 18.30

About the Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

In the Auditorium, Moderna museet, Stockholm
Admission free

Introduction by Daniel Birnbaum

Hal Foster is an American art critic and art historian, born in Seattle in 1955 and a professor at the department of art and archaeology, Princeton University, since 1997. He is currently a Siemens Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Foster has had a seminal influence on our understanding of postmodernism and its relationship to modernism, most recently in his extensive textbook, Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004), co-written with Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. As early as in 1983, Foster published a number of ground-breaking essays in The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture, now regarded as a standard work on postmodernism. Foster began his career as an art critic in 1970s New York, working mainly for Artforum and Art in America, where he was part of the editorial team between 1981 and 1987. In 1990, he presented his dissertation on surrealism at New York City University, later published as Compulsive Beauty (1993).

Since 1991, Foster is co-editor of the magazine October, together with his former tutor Rosalind Krauss and others. He is the author of numerous influential books, including Recodings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996), Design and crime and other diatribes (2003) and Prosthetic Gods (2004).

In collaboration with Södertörns Högskola and Svenska Konstkritikersamfundet.

Tuesday, 5 April 2011, 19:00

In the 1960s, industrial designers were criticized for being immoral junk makers, and artisans for supplying the bourgeoisie with exclusive status symbols. What was art, handicraft or politics? Free embroideries, rugged silver, new clay, glazing or oil paint; the artistic genres were eroding. The difference between utility goods and free art was erased while the Duchamp aesthetics claimed it was the observer who decided what was art. Arts and crafts attracted much attention at Liljevalchs and the National Museum, but still remained marginalized. Cilla Robach structures and close reads the debate on this bewildering period in her thesis “The Liberation of the Form” from 2010.

Cilla Robach, design historian and curator at the National Museum since 1998, will relate the debate on arts and crafts and design in the 1960s. Afterwards there will be a discussion with the author of the book, former professor of design history at Konstfack Kerstin Wickman and the Swedish Art Critics Association chairman Christian Chambert.

A bar serving light food will be open from 18:30.

Address: Konstnärsklubben, 2nd floor, Smålandsgatan 7, Stockholm. Ring door bell marked ”Konstnärsklubben”.

The evening is arranged by the Swedish Art Critics Association in collaboration with the Tuesday Club – the meeting place for artists at Konstnärshuset (the Artists’ House) on the first Tuesday of every month.

This event is held in Swedish.