Local Art Worlds (or Imaginary Geographies with Real Effects)

The painter Ray Parker posited the idea of an art world early on, and yoked it to the new degree-granting art schools burgeoning on US campuses. Art escapes teaching, he wrote in 1953, but ‘the art-world can be understood and taught as a subject’; a ‘degree describes no more nor less than the particular and datable idea of an art-world as modeled by the school that gives it’. Parker’s art world is an imaginary place, built by language, projection and belief. But this imagined world constructs multiple local art worlds that have physical boundaries and real effects. Hans Haacke’s Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969–70) worked to make that specific geography visible on street maps of New York. ‘The information I collected… is sociologically quite revealing. The public of commercial art galleries, and probably that of museums, lives in easily identifiable and restricted areas’. This seminar traces art worlds real and imagined, from art schools in Los Angeles in the 1970s to downtown New York in the 1980s, charting that parochial landscape with Pierre Bourdieu as a ‘field of cultural production’. It concludes by describing communities of New York artists and gallery-goers that Haacke’s map overlooked.

Bio

Howard Singerman is Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Professor of Art History at Hunter College (The City University of New York) and is the author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999); Art History, after Sherrie Levine (2012); and Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat (2019). He has curated and authored lead essays for exhibitions for the Hunter College Art Galleries: Robert Motherwell and the New York School at Hunter (2015); Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971 (2018); and Acts of Art in Greenwich Village (2024). His essays have also appeared in Artforum, La Part de l’Oeil, October, and Oxford Art Journal, and in monographic catalogues on Chris Burden, Charles Gaines, Mike Kelley, Allen Ruppersburg and Frances Stark.

Registration is free but limited to the number of seats available. Please send an email with a short CV to admin@maumaus.org by 15.06.2025. Confirmation of registration will be sent by email. The seminar will be in English.

This event is organised by the working group “Thinking Documentary Film” in collaboration with Maumaus / Lumiar Cité. For further information, please contact: Tel + 351 21 352 11 55 | admin@maumaus.org | www.maumaus.org