Friday Night 09.17.10 — Yates McKee — Critical Regionalism, Critical Climate Change: Field Notes from Southeastern Ohio
Comments Off on Friday Night 09.17.10 — Yates McKee — Critical Regionalism, Critical Climate Change: Field Notes from Southeastern OhioFriday Night — Yates McKee — Critical Regionalism, Critical Climate Change: Field Notes from Southeastern Ohio
CONTENTS:
1. About this Friday
2. Suggested Reading
3. Texts by Yates McKee
4. About Yates McKee
5. Useful Links
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1. About this Friday
What: Talk / Conversation
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: Friday 09.17.10 at 7:15 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This Friday night, we would like to invite you to a talk by a long time contributor to 16 Beaver, Yates McKee.
One of the richest components of this group / space has been the opportunity to engage, trace, and inform the work of various artists, activists, and thinkers over an extended period of time publicly. And to attempt in that publicness, not simply to affirm certain practices or efforts over others, but to find friends willing to also grapple with the emergent political processes, forms, and questions of our time.
The starting point for this talk is the micro-exhibition Political Ecology Research Sites, organized by Matthew Friday and Yates Mckee of the Ohio University Critical Regionalism Initiative in early 2010. This exhibition was an experiment in linking contemporary art history, graduate art training, regional field research, and environmental activism, with a special emphasis on the past, present, and future of coal and the conflicts surrounding it at local, national, and planetary scales. Drawing on the work of figures ranging from Robert Smithson to Van Jones, the exhibition set out to redefine Kenneth Frampton’s classic project of “critical regionalism” in light of the discourse of experimental geography, with the aim of complicating the often depoliticizing visions of ecological sustainability put forth by artists, designers, and curators in recent years. With recent debates concerning the status of “the contemporary” in mind, this talk will argue for the necessity of linking art and criticism to a broad project of “critical climate change” in the Humanities that would be attuned to the multifaceted urgency of global warming. Artists to be discussed include Robert Smithson, Matthew Friday, Jeff Lovett, Jason Nein, Kainaz Amaria, and Ray Klimek, among others.
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2. Suggested Reading
-Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” (1983) available at:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/37271994/Kenneth-Frampton-Towards-a-Critical-
Regionalism-Six-Points-for-an-Architecture-of-Resistance-1983
-Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity,” October 80 (1997) available at:
http://www.spurse.org/entangled/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/miwon-kwon-notes-on-site-specifity.pdf
-Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography,” and Ian Kerr, “Participatory Research,” in Nato Thompson, ed. Experimental Geography (2008) available at:
http://www.spurse.org/entangled/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/paglen_spurse_exp_geo.pdf
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3. Texts by Yates McKee
-“Wake, Vestige, Survival: Sustainability and the Politics of the Trace in Allora and Calzadilla’s Land Mark”: October 133 (Summer 2010), available at:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/octo/-/133″http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/octo/-/133
-“Response,” questionnaire on “The Contemporary,” October 130 (Fall 2009) available at:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/octo/-/130 pp. 64-73
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4. About Yates McKee
Yates McKee is a PhD student in Art History and preceptor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University. He has taught contemporary art at Cooper Union, Parsons, and Ohio University, and his work on art, politics and ecology has appeared in publications including October, Grey Room, Art Journal, Texte Zur Kunst, and Third Text. Along with Gaelle Krikorian, he is the associate editor of Michel Feher’s Nongovernmental Politics (Zone Books, 2007), and with Meg McLagan is currently co-editing The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Politics, forthcoming from Zone Books in 2011.
Forthcoming texts include “Survival” in Tom Cohen and Henry Sussman, eds. An Atlas of Critical Climate Change (Open Humanities Press)”
His work can be found at:
http://yatesmckee.wordpress.com/
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5. Useful Links
-Steve Lam and Sarah Ross, curators: “…in a most dangerous manner,” SPACES Cleveland: http://www.spacesgallery.org/2010/exhibitions/main/in_a_most_dangerous_manner/
-Matthew Friday: http://www.matthewfriday.net/research/
-Ray Klimek: http://www.finearts.ohio.edu/art/faculty-staff/klimek.htm
-Jeff Lovett: http://www.jefflovett.net/
-Kainaz Amaria: http://kainazamaria.com/
-Jason Nein: http://jasonnein.com/home.html
-Campuses Beyond Coal: http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/campus/default.aspx
-Coal is Dirty: http://www.coal-is-dirty.com
-Little Cities of Black Diamonds: http://littlecitiesofblackdiamonds.org/
-Sunday Creek Watershed Group: http://www.sundaycreek.org/
-Mobilization for Climate Justice: http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/