Adorno - some reading/easy listening

For those of you interested in reading up on Adorno post our Paul Chan visit, a surprising - and humorous - way in might be to start here. These are punk tracks by Brian Joseph Davis, a Canadian artist, who has used phrases from Adorno's Minima Moralia as inspiration for his music.

Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life) is a seminal text in Critical Theory. Adorno wrote it during World War II, while he lived as an exile in America.

For those of you who understand German, there are some great clips of Adorno online here and here (this one is especially relevant as it is Adorno on Beckett, which dovetails nicely with P. Chan). Click here to hear P. Chan reading Adorno's Post Festum.

Also, click here to read a great interview in the Brooklyn Rail with Robert Hullot-Kentor, an Adorno translator and friend of P. Chan's on Adorno's idea of Verblendungszusammenhang -- the "web of unknowing" -- among other concepts.

MoMA - Friday 9/25

If you feel like staying in NYC until the 8pm bus on 9/25, we recommend visiting MoMA which is free on Fridays (!) and has the following interesting art and design -related shows:

Ron Arad: No Discipline

Rough Cut: Design Takes a Sharp Edge

What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message 1944-56

(sadly, the James Ensor show closes on September 21st)

Pentagram

On Friday 9/25 we'll be visiting the iconic graphic-interactive-identity-architecture-industrial design company






For more information about Pentagram projects and the firm's unique organization, please visit:

http://pentagram.com/en/

And here's a link to a particularly stunning recently designed website:

http://www.dsrny.com/

Paul Chan: New York Visit 1

We'll be visiting Paul Chan's studio on September 25th. If you're not familiar with his work, start by clicking on this link to view some it. He exhibits with Greene Naftali in New York.

Last September, Paul had an exhibition at the New Museum called Paul Chan: The 7 Lights. Click here to read more about the show.

In the May 26th, 2008 edition of the New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins wrote a profile of Paul entitled Shadow Player, which is a great read and worth checking out at the library.

In 2006, Paul started working on a project to stage Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. The staging was produced by Creative Time. Click here to view images, video, and documentation of the experience. Here is the nyt's coverage of the event.

Finally, click here to visit Paul's site.

Welcome to ADColab!

Although the Modernist idea of autonomy within each medium continues to play a major role in art and design, much of the most innovative work of the last thirty years has seen practitioners in both fields muddying the waters. Artists have increasingly turned to the more applied processes within the design world (mass-distribution, industrial fabrication, intersection with everyday life) as part of their work, while many designers have been adopting ideas traditionally associated with fine arts (complexity and contradiction within a piece, the idea of challenging the audience, focusing more on making as a process than as a means to an end).

We will visit, on three New York trips, practitioners working at the intersection of art and design. Visits are designed to introduce students to the different steps in the cultural superstructure, from artists, fabricators and designers, to institutional and commercial distributors, to critics and editors writing about the field. Readings ranging from the Frankfurt School to contemporary theorists will supplement our visits and provide focus for in-class discussion, as well as the jumping-off point for written assignments. In several assignments over the semester, students from different disciplines will collaborate on conceiving and making studio projects and preparing a fully realized strategy for their appearance in the world.