More book news – but this time from a student rather than from staff members! On the occasion of the reopening of the Stedelijk Museum, Stedelijk Collection Highlights: 150 Artists from the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents a discussion of the most defining works of the Museum’s renowned art and design collection. VAMA student and Stedelijk intern Angela Bartholomew was highly involved in the development of the publication, authoring and editing many of the entries for the book including those with works by Nam June Paik, Ellsworth Kelly, Danh Vo, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mathias Poledna, Martha Rosler, Melvin Moti, Cady Noland, Jean Tinguely, Max Beckmann, Yael Bartana, Carl Andre, and Willem de Kooning, among others.

In March, Duke University Press will publish Ginette Verstreate‘s Tracking Europe. “Tracking Europe is a bold interdisciplinary critique of claims regarding the free movement of goods, people, services, and capital throughout Europe. Ginette Verstraete interrogates European discourses on unlimited movement for everyone and a utopian unity-in-diversity in light of contemporary social practices, cultural theories, historical texts, media representations, and critical art projects. Arguing against the persistent myth of borderless travel, Verstraete shows the discourses on Europe to be caught in an irresolvable contradiction on a conceptual level and in deeply unsettling asymmetries on a performative level. She asks why the age-old notion of Europe as a borderless space of mobility goes hand-in-hand with the at times violent containment and displacement of people.”

The spring will also see the publication of History in Motion by Sven Lütticken (Sternberg Press), which deals with the current “economy of time,” marked as it is by ubiquitous real-time media, and its impact on the representation and the production of history. More on that publication at some future moment.

Swedish Embassy, New Delhi, 1959 (© Ake Eson Lindman)
Architects: Sune Lindströ and Goran Curman 

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In search of a national vision: Swedish embassies from the mid-20^th century to the present

Lecture by dr. Denise Hagströmer
Tuesday 30^th October
16:00, room 11A-06
VU University Amsterdam

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In her lecture Denise Hagströmer examines how national values are reflected and given solid form in Swedish embassies and residences. Through several case studies – namely the embassies in New Delhi, Madrid, Moscow, Tokyo and Berlin – she explores conceptions of national identity, modernity and progress, and the significance of Swedish national tradition. Although her research is mainly of a design-historical nature, Hagströmer also draws on other disciplines, including architectural history, the history of ideas, European ethnology, social history, political science and sociology. Her research provides an identification and analysis of the political and cultural processes behind Swedish design and architecture in its official representations. It also deconstructs Sweden’s ‘national modernisation’ project and provides an assessment of the social meaning of collectively perceived ‘tradition’.

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Denise Hagströmer is a Swedish design historian, based in London and Stockholm. MA Design History, Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum. Has curated exhibitions at the Design Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum; publishes and lectures in the UK, US and Europe. Publications include Swedish Design, (Swedish Institute, 2001) and ‘Sweden’ in K. Livingstone ed., International Arts and Crafts, (V&A, 2005). Senior lecturer at Konstfack, National College of Art and Design, Stockholm. Visiting Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University, Department of Art History (Sweden). From January 2013: Senior Curator, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway, in charge of design.

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To mark the 132nd anniversary of the founding of the university, Friday October 19 will focus on research in our very own Faculty of Arts. Wanted: imagination! is the theme of the 2012-2013 academic year, and it is against that background that we will be awarding an honorary doctorate to Rem Koolhaas for his outstanding services to architecture, particularly his innovative theoretical contributions to the debate on architecture, urban planning and landscape design.

The official, public meeting of the College of Deans will take place in the afternoon and will include a Dies Natalis lecture, Meaningful Architecture, by Prof. Michel ter Hark (Dean of the Faculty of Arts), a message from author Kristien Hemmerechts and the presentation of the Societal Impact Awards. For the programme and reservations, please click here.

But there is more! A morning programme, organized by the Faculty of Arts, will focus on The Aura of the Architect. It will include lectures by Roel Griffioen (VAMA), Koos Bosma (VU) and Bart Verschaffel (Ghent University), as well as a speech by Rem Koolhaas. All will be wrapped up with a discussion, moderated by Nancy Stieber (University of Massachusetts).

Take a closer look at the programme and don’t forget to register via dies2012.let@vu.nl, because we’re expecting a full house.

A picture update: impressions from the ceremony…

Indeed! This Friday, August 31, the Faculty of Arts is hosting its annual Masters’ Introduction Day. This will include a plenary session for all new MA students of the Art & Culture Department, as well as a VAMA-specific introduction by our new programme director Sven Lütticken. You can find Friday’s programme here.

Chances are, Sven Lütticken will tell you about the upcoming series of VAMA Reading Seminars. Three seminars are planned for the first semester, with guest lecturers André Rottmann & John Knight (September), Rem Koolhaas (October) and TJ Demos (November). Keep an eye out for more information about the seminars on this website soon!

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After several months of stimulating lectures, the Métamatic Artists’ Lectures Series will come to an end tomorrow. Only one more lecture remains: that of Jon Kessler. So head to Felix Meritis (Keizersgracht 324) one last time on June 19. Be sure to register via paul@allartinitiatives.org and to get there on time. As always, the lecture starts at 20:00.

Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers, New York in 1957. His first exhibition was at Artist’s Space in 1983. Since that time he has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and Asia. A retrospective of his work ‘Jon Kessler’s Asia’ was mounted at the Kestner-Gesselshaft in Hannover, Germany in 1994 and travelled to the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, in Graz, Austria. His exhibition, ‘The Palace at 4 AM’, began at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in 2005 and travelled to the Phoenix Kulturstiftung / Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen and ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. His works are in many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and MOCA. He is a Professor in the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts where he has taught since 1994. He plays guitar for the rock band ‘Barbara Sukowa and the X-Patsys’. Jon Kessler’s ‘The Web’ is an immersive installation that addresses the significance of the internet and mobile devices in our lives while simultaneously examining the role of the viewer in the installation.

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Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist whose work focuses on the creative-critical interpretation of contemporary landscapes. In 2010, she completed a PhD in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Wasteland: American Landscapes in/and 1960s Art,” examines early land-based art in relation to the actual spaces and spatial politics it engaged, pursuing how and why degraded environments served as fertile grounds for artistic experimentation in this period. Parallel to her studies, she cofounded the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, an art collective that develops guided hikes, campfire talks, field kits, and other interpretive tools to spark creative explorations of everyday habitats in their home megalopolis and beyond.

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On March 20, Dr. Emily Scott kicked off her time here with an introductory lecture: Group Pioneering: Robert Smithson and Circle’s Early Forays to the Field (c. 1967). Beginning in 1966, American artist Robert Smithson and a circle of his friends set out on a series of speculative field excursions to the outskirts of New York City, driven in part by their growing desire to create large-scale artworks on the actual land. In her talk, Emily Scott highlighted the collaborative nature of such endeavors, giving special attention to the crucial involvement of Nancy Holt (then Nancy Smithson), his wife, and the eminent gallerist Virginia Dwan. For, while Smithson was indeed a primary instigator, he produced much of his work in the field with fellow travelers, amid rich conversation and a shared sense of adventure. One of Scott’s motivations in unearthing these grainy, now-historical events is to mobilize the methodological dilemmas they pose to art history as usual.

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Starting this week, Dr. Emily Scott will be teaching the seminar Art-Media-Sites in the 1960s to interested MA- and 3rd year BA-students. Jean Tinguely’s anomalously early desert artwork, Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), provides a lucid aperture onto two technologies that emerged in the decades following World War II and profoundly impacted the period: the atomic bomb (representing the potential end to all technology) and television (representing the potential translation of all into spectacle). His Nevada “study” addressed both simultaneously, critically mimicking atomic tests and their mass mediation on television. By way of key texts, artworks, and films from the 1960s, this seminar will explore artists’ increasing attention to site at the same moment when media such as television were radically refiguring space and spatial experience.

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top: Stone Ruin Tour II led by Nancy Holt, Cedar Grove/Little Falls, New Jersey, USA, 6 January 1968. Participants included Robert Smithson, Allan Kaprow and his family, and Claes and Pat Oldenburg.
bottom: Jean Dry Lake, Nevada, the scene for Jean Tinguely’s Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962).

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