Lines of Flight
April 20 - June 4, 2016
Lines of Flight presents three related projects: two exhibitions and one series of educational programming. Each contribution investigates points of rupture within current discourses in order to propose intersections between the art-historical, the political, and the educational. By presenting varied interrogations into the relationship between art, education, subjectivity, and politics, the three projects hope to provoke previously unexamined links between art and the world in which we live.
As developed in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the line of flight represents the potential for new linkages across existing boundaries. Lines of flight are posed against static forms and structures, creating both disruption and connection in a constant process of evolution. As a framework, the line of flight unites the exhibition's sections through a general mode of inquiry that embraces the potential and the provisional.
Lines of Flight is curated by David Crane and Leah Hartman, with educational programming organized by Kat Cohn. It is the fourth presentation of the MODA Curates series—an annual opportunity offered by The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies Program (MODA) for outstanding curatorial proposals related to students' theses.
Organized by David Crane, "Life Serial" presents the work of a number of artists who utilize various methods of serial production as the means to investigate notions of subjectivity. Characterized by conceptual systems, modularity, and geometric formulas, seriality has often been used as a way to eliminate the psychological and physical traces of the artist from their objects. In many cases, the focus on seriality led to work that tends towards the ahistorical, cut off from social and political concerns. Against this grain, Life Serial brings together a diverse group of artists who use serial methods to posit a new form of subjectivity as a means to explore issues of race, sexuality, history, and the body.
• Bethany Collins
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres
• Wade Guyton
• Leslie Hewitt
• Ragnar Kjartansson
• Emily Kloppenburg
• Glenn Ligon
"Contemporary Ruins: Resistance to the Spectacular Image", curated by Leah Hartman, features a selection of artists who engage with the aestheticization of cultural heritage destruction and its reception by the global media. Attacks on culture have a long history: from the Nazi Party’s attempt to eradicate “degenerate” art to the Taliban’s annihilation of the Bamiyan Buddhas to the Islamic State’s recent videos, these efforts are tied together by the immutable and complex connections between art, culture, power, and politics. The works presented in Contemporary Ruins respond to the spectacular nature of modern iconoclastic imagery, prompting us to consider more closely where mediated images of violence and destruction fall within the intersection of art, propaganda, and documentary.
Lida Abdul
Kader Attia
Tammam Azzam
Wafaa Bilal
Rokni Haerizadeh
Yujin Lee
The educational programming searches for alternative pedagogical practices in the arts in a student-organized podcast, “Lines in Real Time.” The series includes three main episodes, each composed of two halves, “Line” and “Real Time.” In “Line,” the guest-host presents a line of inquiry on one pedagogical method. “Real Time” features the guest-host applying that method to practice. The topics of these episodes are the ethics of display, types of dialogue surrounding art, and audience engagement with works in progress. A supplemental episode examines historical themes in progressive education and pedagogical theory that contextualize the other episodes and consider K–12 audiences.
The lineup of hosts and guests includes Katherine Cohn, Bethany Collins, David Crane, Sarah Diver, Daniela Fifi, Leah Hartman, Pablo Helguera, Jessica Holmes, Emily Kloppenburg, Michelle Marques, David Levi Strauss, Allison Freedman Weisberg, and more to be announced!