Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Sven Spieker

"Art as Demonstation”

[Response: Devin Fore]

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 @5pm ET

N107 (School of Architecture)

 

Art as Demonstration reconceives the history of postwar art in Eastern and Western Europe from the perspective of demonstration, understood formally (as a technique for showing and pointing) as well as politically (as protest, resistance, etc.). Focusing on Western Europe (especially Germany), Eastern Europe, and the United States, Art as Demonstration expands on contemporary discussions of art-as-protest, activism, and resistance. Spieker shows how protest and resistance organize art and artists not only politically but also and especially formally and aesthetically—a development of particular importance in the Cold War art and politics of Eastern Europe. The boo aims to shows how a closer, more historical look at art's connection with demonstration can reconnect us with earlier efforts, notably by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, to marshal art for the purpose of instruction and engagement.

Sven Spieker teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in modern and contemporary art, aesthetic and critical theory, and global and transnational art and art history. His books and articles have appeared in English, German, Korean, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Albanian, and Polish. He is a founding editor of ARTMargins Online and ARTMarginsPrint Journal, and a co-founder of the Working Group Cultures of World Socialism. His latest book publications are Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2024) as well as a co-edited volume about sound in art and culture (Akusmatik als Labor, ed. with Mario Asef. Koenigshausen Neumann, 2023). Spieker is the author, among others, of The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008), and the editor of Destruction (MIT Press, 2017).

Devin Fore is Professor of German at Princeton University. He is editor of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (Yale University Press, 2017) and History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Zone Books, 2014); he is also author of Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (The MIT Press, 2012) and Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room N107 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.