David Joselit: How To Make The Many

Organised in cooperation with other educational institutions, Kunsthalle Zurich hosts keynote lectures by leading theorists of art who will discuss their seminal work in rela- tion to the current exhibition and in a subsequent seminar with students. The theme of “flatness” in the context of Haim Steinbach’s exhibition will be explored by influential art historian David Joselit from the perspective of his latest book “After Art” (2012), in which he examines the state of objects and/as images in digital times:

Conceptual art developed an array of techniques for multiplying images: seriality, permutation, indexing, and research. Indeed, rather than dematerializing the work of art Conceptual procedures caused art objects to divide and multiply. In general, these practices were rule-based and deployed neutral, often interchangeable units.
More recent multitudes of images—those belonging to the “post- Conceptual” moment—are better described as content aggregators: combinations of dissimilar, or singular images and objects, which are arrayed, rather than composed, within a common space. Here, what matters is a charged intimacy of things whose significance arises out of different degrees of proximity. In the work of Haim Steinbach, Conceptual art’s neutral procedures give way to zones of affect; rather than opposing objects to subjects as Conceptual Art was fond of doing, here subjectivity is distributed across objects—as an effect of their combination in multitudes.

Haim Steinbach will be present for the conversation.

As a scholar and a critic David Joselit has worked on pivotal moments in modern art ranging from the Dada movement of the early 20th century to the emergence of globalization and new media over the past decade. His latest book, “After Art” continues the argu- ments made in “Feedback: Television Against Democracy” (2007), which addresses television as a closed circuit that video artists and media activists have broken into in a variety of ways since the 1960s. Joselit’s first book, “Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910- 1941” (1998), positions Duchamp’s art at the intersection of a waning industrial world and the emergence of consumer culture in the late teens and twenties. “American Art Since 1945” (2003) is a synthetic survey that grows in part out of Joselit’s years as a cura- tor at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston during the 1980s, and his longstanding practice as a critic for such publications as Artforum and Art in America. He is currently an editor of OCTOBER, and Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York. In addition to his main areas of research Joselit has a strong interest in gender, queer, and feminist studies.