2012 April 17 at the DAI auditorium: Public lecture by Fareed Armaly / "A lecture can now be recorded and sent around with the slides..."
"A lecture can now be recorded and sent around with the slides. The idea is that this can be given vitality as an "art form", as a destroyer, disturber and instructor." Excerpt: "Plans for Work, October 1937" James Agee
This presentation considers a select set of paths and roads that weave through museum exhibitions and modern American land-/mindscape narratives. These paths connect by virtue of their relation to the historically ambivalent status of photography to art. While this new, in-between sensibility gives rise to responses in the form of new model of exhibition making, as well, the unresolved status allows for unpredicted permutations to develop. Many of these paths belong in the context of depicting society with the demands of new social, political orientations in the first half of the 20th century. Distinctions are questioned, i.e. between fiction and documentary; the literary author vs. photo authoring; exterior- / interiority, technology and art, education and propaganda. Some of the examples return, decades later, as an Uncanny DNA reproducing from the archives seen embedded in the 1980s new photography / curatorial spirit. My early works sensibility is to throw out the 1980s photography object and keep the network of relations that its agency and meaning became immersed within. Which is where I will conclude this presentation by briefly introducing two, very different, early works of mine, and the vexed routes through a modern landscape that structured them.
Bio Fareed Armaly
Fareed Armaly was invited by Doreen Mende for