Claire Bishop in conversation with Kate Fowle

(Walther Konig, Cologne, 2014)

Claire Bishop
“Radical Museology: Or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art?”
A conversation with Kate Fowle
Thursday, June 12, 2014
7–8pm
192 Books
190 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011
FREE and open to the public

With austerity cuts to public funding, many contemporary art museums have been forced to scale down their budgets, staff and acquisitions. In Radical Museology, New York–based art historian Claire Bishop argues that the incommensurability of fiscal and cultural temporality—one fast, the other slower—points to an alternative world of values in which museums (and by extension, culture, education and democracy in general) are not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet, but enable us to access a rich and diverse history, to question the present and to realize a different future. She discusses creative solutions implemented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana. “Radical Museology: Or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art?” is a manifesto for the importance of a politicized representation of the contemporary in today’s art.

June 12, 2014

192 Books
90 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011

presenter

Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop is a Professor of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Bishop is an internationally acknowledged scholar of contemporary art. Her dissertation was published as Installation Art: A Critical History and quickly became an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the subject. Her edited volume, Participation (MIT Press, 2006), is also highly regarded in the field. She is the author of two influential essays—“Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October, 2004) and “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” (Artforum, 2006). Both have been translated and reprinted a number of times. Bishop curated the exhibition Double Agent (2008) at the London ICA, and is working on a book about socially-engaged art and spectatorship.
She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Essex.

Kate Fowle

Kate Fowle is Director of MoMA PS1 in New York. From 2013-2019 she was the inaugural Chief Curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and director-at-large at Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York, where she was the Executive Director from 2009-13. Prior to this she was the international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2007-08). In 2002 she co-founded the Master’s Program in Curatorial Practice for California College of the Arts in San Francisco, for which she was the Chair until 2007. Before moving to the United States, Fowle was co-director of Smith + Fowle in London from 1996-2002. From 1994-96 she was curator at the Towner Art Gallery and Museum in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

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