This April I had the pleasure of moderating a panel for the always excellent annual What Now? symposium organized by Art in General and the Vera LIst Center at the New School, New York.

What Now? 2015 examines the idea of listening as a political act, a pedagogical process, and a protocol for engagement. Opening with an analysis of listening, the symposium considers the scientific definition of the term alongside perspectives on listening that are shaped and informed by diverse social, cultural, technological, and spatial considerations. As keynote speaker Lawrence Abu Hamdan has noted, “Listening is not a natural process inherent to our perception of the world but rather constructed by the conditions of the spaces and times that engulf us”.

I participated in SESSION THREE: FACT, FICTION, AND THE IN-BETWEEN

This panel addresses the slippages between truth and fiction in relation to interpretative listening, media communication, and acts of testimony, translation, or redaction. What is the place of language and translation in this evolving narrative space? Every translation sets into play distinct vocabularies and systems of listening and interpreting, and it is in these encounters that priorities and positions are negotiated. In forensic analysis, for example, how are ideas of truth, testimony, propaganda, translation (or “untranslatability”) played out? In terms of oral histories, why are narratives meant to be listened to rather than read alone, and what is the relative role and importance of accuracy, credibility, and the spinning of truth within this realm?

Moderator: Lauren van Haaften-Schick
Participants: Joshua Craze, Naeem Mohaiemen, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Full information on the symposium here.

I’m very pleased to be presenting a paper on the legal history and impact of Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky’s “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” at the  Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities.

The conference will be held at Georgetown University Law Centre, March 6-7, 2015.

More information on the conference here.

My essay on the Paradox of Non-Participation is now up on the New Museum’s Six Degrees blog here.

Thanks to Taraneh Fazeli at the Museum for organizing this opportunity.

“Non-Participation,” 2014. Exhibition view: the Luminary, St. Louis, MO. Letters by W.A.G.E., Melanie Park, Helena Keeffe, and Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento pictured.

If you’re in the Houston area, please join me next weekend for the workshops Gauging the Grey Area: A Human Spectrum and Gauging the Grey Area: Quiz Me, with Helena Keeffe, for the Charge Practicum at the Arts League Houston

Saturday August 9th will be the final day for my exhibition Non-Participation at the Luminary  in St. Louis.

James and Brea McAnally of the Luminary will host a workshop based on one I presented with Helena Keeffe at UC Berkeley this past spring, Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor. They will facilitate a workshop and series of discussion prompts and exercises exploring the ways artists’ measure, define, and negotiate their desired terms for their labor.

Full text available on Scribd and on Academia.edu

This article is the product of a class I took in the Sociology of Culture with professor Cynthia Epstein at the CUNY Graduate Center in Fall 2013,  and of a talk given by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento at Texas A&M University around the same time.

Following his talk, Munoz Sarmiento was invited to contribute an article to this issue of the Law Review. Noting the similarity in our respective papers’ arguments concerning the Cariou v. Prince case, appropriation, copyright and artists’ labor rights, Muñoz Sarmiento invited me to collaborate on this publication, taking it as an opportunity to memorialize the numerous conversations we had had on what this seminal appropriation art case meant for contemporary art, art history, and artistic production and reception.

Thus, this theoretical article is written with the intent of impacting the mindset of those in the arts. Not that those in the law cannot gain from our article. We imagine the article as providing another glimpse to those in the law other than the spectacle portrayed on a daily basis by glossy magazines, art journals, and sensationalist blogs.

The article is also not intended to rewrite or much less rehash all that has been written about medium specificity, aesthetic judgments, and labor in art. Instead, the article pinpoints these three main areas so as to highlight how law — when misapplied and leveraged by those with specific agendas — can have dire consequences for artists, curators, and writers beyond the walls of a court and auction house.

My sincere thanks to Muñoz Sarmiento for inviting me to collaborate with him on what we hope will prove an important article and position to take.