The defining question of modern art was how to release the image from representation. The problem for contemporary art is how to find new approaches, materials, techniques, and technologies for remapping this question in ways responsive to our current history and media environment. What has the image become under new conditions of technological production and reproduction, amplified flows of communication through social and mass media, and the global expansion of neoliberalism, both politically and economically? In this talk, Rodowick appeals to Theodor Adorno’s late writings on aesthetics to evaluate contemporary art’s critical responses to its current technological and social condition in works by Phillipe Parreno, Sturtevant, Pierre Huyghe, Michel Majerus, Cory Arcangel, and other international artists.
Biography
D. N. Rodowick is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and Visual Arts. He is the author of numerous essays as well as eight books, including most recently, What Philosophy Wants from Images (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Rodowick is also a curator and an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. His digital moving image works were recently selected for conservation and distribution by Light Cone in Paris.
