An Artist's talk at Cooper-Union School of Art. It was a cold winter night. It began with the entire crowd (maybe 60, it was a full room) delivering Adrienne Kennedy's brief one act play "A Lesson in Dead Language." Latecomers faced a room of people chanting, "I bleed." The scores in attendance were fed granola bars because the organizer, artist Isaac Nichols, could not locate any beef jerky nearby. It was a fantasy—to throw dried meat at the crowd—and it remained a fantasy. Later, someone complained that late audience members also got granola bars.
The posters were hand-painted on old school paper expressly for this lecture—each sporting a title of an alternate lecture that could have been delivered (but was not).
*** Lecture Description ***
Agnes Varda mistakenly refers to the Morning After Pill as the After Night Pill. This mess-up can lean towards the fantasy of what happens after night—when night is not only a literal darkness, but a medium that contains unholy politics and masked objects. As Duras says, "The Night is a Book." Here, dusk is a pill.
Let's imagine the After Night Pill as taken up by artists. Unlike the Morning After Pill, artists will not wish to return unscathed to the identical site of the night before. What if, instead, they make an art work that forges a new sort of temporal moment that is not, say a stark and brutal Khmer agrarian future or a Late Capitalist frat house dis/utopia of sex, food, indentured servants 24/7? What might we make when our job as artists is to operate within indeterminate light, with "radiant uncertainties" intact and the slowness and darkness of the dawn allowing for both artist and audience to remain veiled, unmeasured, and unpredictable?
Other subjects touched: Against fantasies of purity in art: political and aesthetic. The role of Indexical art (pointing at what exists) vs. imaginary practices (pointing towards what could begin, dystopic or utopic). Class as a category of 'night' that is cloaked when we speak about art. Slowness as medium.