Critical Inversions | this-red-door

—–> Wednesday, January 30th, 2013 @ 7pm

Critical Inversions – Artist to Critic, and the Publics in Between

A discussion with critic Ken Johnson, artist Lisa Corinne Davis, artist Anoka Faruqee and artist William Villalongo

This discussion will pursue a generative conversation about cultural production, societal value, and how critical faculty figures into the assessment of agency between artifacts deemed art and those potential audiences that might receive said objects, experiences, or material of whatever type as art. We problematically take for granted that anyone and everyone interested in this dialogue shares some point of agreement about what is ‘art’, per se, however contrary or correspondent their arguments.

Of course, discrete, integrated, and marginal notions of what constitute social currency, and what aesthetic principles are worth fortifying in the face of the ever increasing trafficking of ideas at the expense of the sensate, will all be at play in the room this evening. Although responses to art critic Ken Johnson’s New York Times’ review Forged from the Fire of The 1960’s: ‘Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles’at MoMA PS 1, and his capsule review of The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art serve as prompts, this occasion will provide an opportunity for an expressive dialogue within a diverse community, about what it means to live an artistic life that is rigorously conscious of the powers of creative intellection.

A discussion with critic Ken Johnson, artist Lisa Corinne Davis, artist Anoka Faruqee and artist William Villalongo

Moderated by Joan Waltemath, Jomar Statkun, and Christopher Stackhouse

Foreground, Maren Hassinger’s “Place for Nature” (2011); in the corner, Senga Nengudi’s “Only Love Saves the Day” (2011); and on the wall, David Hammons’s body print, “The Wine Leading the Wine,” around 1969, on display at MoMA PS1 in Queens.