Ina Blom - "Houses to Die In" - Matthew Jesse Jackson
Ina Blom will discuss Houses To Die In and Other Essays on Art. She will be joined in conversation by Matthew Jesse Jackson.
Virtual event
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About the book: The undead of contemporary painting, avant-garde populism, photography courting stupidity, fraught networking, synthetic atmospheres, displaced abstractions, and the mediation of pain: these are among the subjects treated in this collection of essays by art historian and critic Ina Blom. Drawing on Blom's familiarity with the contemporary art scene as well as the archives of twentieth-century avant-garde art, these texts share a pull towards artistic projects that are not redemptive or exemplary but that rather convey a sense of—often unheroic—trouble. Leaning into ambivalence as a methodology of criticism, Blom takes a particular interest in the detours, doubts, and difficulties that run alongside avant-garde art’s more constructively hopeful desires for transformative innovation and change.
About the author: Ina Blom is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo and Wigeland Visiting Professor at the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Her fields of research are modernism/avant-garde studies and contemporary art with a particular focus on the relationship between art, technology, media, and politics. Blom is the author of On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture (2007 and 2009) and The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016) and the co-editor of Raoul Hausmann et les avantgardes (2014) and Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (2017). She is also an art critic, contributing to journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, and Parkett.
About the interlocutor: Matthew Jesse Jackson is Professor of Art History, Theater and Performance Studies, Visual Arts and the College at the University of Chicago and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts, Modern and Contemporary art. He is the author of Il’ia i Emiliia Kabakovy: Gde nashe mesto? [Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Where Is Our Place? (2019) and The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (2010 and 2016), winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award from The Dedalus Foundation for outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts, as well as the Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences. He is also the editor and co-translator from the Russian of Ilya Kabakov: On Art (2018) - the definitive collection of Kabakov’s writings in English.
Related Titles
This book takes its cue from a simple observation. During the last 30 years or so, the term style has all but disappeared from art critical or art historical terminology. For new art history it was an increasingly problematic term, associated with the taxonomist and historicist concerns of "old...