Open Sites: April 8, 1970
LIGHT IN BUFFALO
Molly Nesbit
6pm Thursday 7 February 2008
Institute of Fine Arts - #1 E. 78 St, New York NY

Art historian Molly Nesbit will present Open Sites: April 18 1970; Michel Foucault Lectures on Manet at Albright-Knox, the first in a cycle of three lectures beginning this thursday called LIGHT IN BUFFALO. The lectures constitute the 2008 Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures at the IFA. Lectures are open to the public, but a reservation to [email protected] is required. From the press release:

Each lecture begins with a case study. Collectively they provide materials, tools, and examples with which to return the problem of art history to history. The fourth wall came off the theater of art history in the late sixties, just as it came off the revolution, the philosophical concept and the work of art. What is the physical reality of a thought ripped open? a lecture? a painting? Where does a work stand? And for how long? Who speaks for it? And for how long? These were the kinds of questions that erupted and interrupted. They provide the shadow for the light in Buffalo.

...At the beginning of the twentieth century, modern art's way of casting history involved projections outward, beyond the object, toward the future. The future came to replace history's long view. And yet before long this future found itself cut back and frozen, replaced by an endless present. Paradoxically, a return to history now can move us in turns both backward and forward. The friction could spark. Implicit is another question, a critical and political question: what would it mean for the work of art now to break open, to reinstall the long view forward and, at the same time, nonformally, empirically, ground it?