Ideologies of Beauty and the Sublime
Tuesday, March 17, 2020 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Remote event
A Conversation with John Miller and Laura López Paniagua
In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Edmund Burke definitively distinguished the sublime from the beautiful, inaugurating an epoch in which the former, typified by Romanticism, would become a central concern in the arts. Later, these categories seemed increasingly dubious and, at times, threatened to disappear. In the twentieth century, however, they re-emerge ever more forcefully in the writings of artists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers as if they were still necessary and pertinent to aesthetic experience.
In this talk, artist and writer John Miller will discuss contemporary ideologies of beauty and the sublime with Laura López Paniagua. Miller has considered these questions in his text “The Weather is Here: Wish You Were Beautiful” (1990) and in the video works “Mannequin Death” (2015) and “What Is a Subject? (2020), which will be screened during the discussion. In response to the critique embodied in Miller’s art and writing, Mike Kelley once described him as “a utopian, (whose) basic worldview is Marxist and has a black sense of humor - generally delivered with a straight face.”
John Miller is an artist, writer and musician based in New York and Berlin. In 2011 he received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Society for Contemporary Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Miller’s books include Mike Kelley: Educational Complex published by Afterall Books, in addition to The Ruin of Exchange: Selected Writings and The Price Club: Selected Writings (1977-1998), both published by JRP-Ringier and the Consortium as part of their Positions series. La Magasin in Grenoble, the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Kunsthalle Zurich have held solo exhibitions of his artwork. In 2016 the ICA Miami featured “I Stand, I Fall,” his first comprehensive survey in the United States. The Schinkel Pavillon is currently holding his first major retrospective in Berlin. Miller is a Professor of Professional Practice in Barnard College’s Art History Department.
Date & time: Tuesday, March 17, 2020, 5:30-6:30pm
The event takes place remotely; link to join (Google Hangouts)>>
Open to everyone interested
Image on poster by John Miller
Email: [email protected]