Ladies Night at The Pawn Shop
with Julieta Aranda, Liz Linden, and Special Guests
7pm
e-flux - 55 ludlow street, New York NY
FREE

Gillian Laub at the NYPL
6:30pm
Mid-Manhattan Public Library - 455 Fifth Ave, New York NY
FREE

From the Specific to the General: The Publications of Seth Siegelaub
with Alexander Alberro, Christophe Cherix, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, and Seth Siegelaub
6:30pm
MoMA - 11 West 53 Street, New York NY
$10

Tonight at 7pm, e-flux hosts Ladies Night at The Pawnshop, a discussion between artists Liz Linden and Julieta Aranda on ethical consumerism and strategies of reverse gentrification; hot topics, perhaps, for the holiday season in general or in the wake of this year's Buy Nothing Day in particular. There is a reminder of the latter anti-holiday on e-flux's website, meant as a counter to Black Friday (usually one of the 10 most active shopping days of the year in the US) and to function symbolically as a day to launch anti-capitalist protests and potentially send minor shockwaves through retail and other industries. Buy Nothing Day, although now largely supported and publicized through Kalle Lasn's AdBusters journal, was initially started in 1992 by Vancouver-based illustrator and artist Ted Dave. That e-flux should mention Buy Nothing Day is nothing short of wry, self-aware irony, considering the downtown location has been converted into an aestheticized Pawnshop-style depot of commercial art, and is still buying and pawning work by artists.

Meanwhile in mid-town at the New York Public Library photographer Gillian Laub will present and talk about her recently published book of photographs Testimony, a suite of portraits taken during the photographer's five year travels in Isreal, Palestine, and the more contested areas between the two. Pictures of Isreali Jews, Isreali Arabs, displaced Lebenese families, and Palestinians constitute the book, along with transcripts of written "testimonials" given by Laub's subjects. The artist will be speaking about her work and it's relation to the 40 anniversary of the Arab-Isreali Six-day War, a conflict highly formative in the current disputes over control of the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

At MoMA tonight, contemporary art historian and critic Alexander Alberro talks to museum curator Christophe Cherix, artists Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry, and former gallerist and publisher Seth Siegelaub. The discussion will be on Siegelaub's historic contributions establishing exhibition platforms for conceptual art since the 1960s both in traditional gallery spaces and in publishing projects, with a focus on the latter. When Siegelaub operated a New York gallery in the mid 60s, he was a steadfast supporter of conceptual work, going so far as to provide couches for gallery patrons to sit on in order to have more time to contemplate the work on view.