APRIL 6 | SUHAIL MALIK

SUN APRIL 6 | 7p    SUHAIL MALIK (Goldsmith’s University, Visiting Professor: Bard College)

“Normative Transgressive Media”

A now-standard case against transgression having traction for counter-power is that it has become a key operation for both extra-judicial authority and capitalization, a conjunction core to contemporary domination operationalized via the state, culture, commerce, and finance, amongst other forms of big power. Should transgression then be abandoned as yet another turn of the counter-normative screw, paradoxically characteristic of dominant power in risk societies? Given these conditions, this presentation will contend that media, qua channels of complex and anonymous socialization, are now key to operationalizing transgressions that do effective socio-political work by no less paradoxically seeking to resecure norms.

Suhail Malik is 2012-14 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York, and Programme Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent publications include: Co-editor of Realism Materialism Art and The Flood of Rights (both 2014); “The Value of Everything” in Texte zur Kunst (2014); “The Ruling Elite Have Feelings Too” in The New Reader (2014); “Ape Says No” in Red Hook Journal (2013); On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art at Artists Space, NY (2013); “The Politics of Neutrality: Constructing a Global Civility” in The Human Snapshot (2013): “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization” (with Andrea Phillips) in Art and Its Commercial Markets (2012); “Why Art? The Primacy of Audience” at Global Art Forum, Dubai (2011); “The Wrong of Contemporary Art: Aesthetics and Political Indeterminacy” (with Andrea Phillips) in Reading Rancière (2011); “Educations Sentimental and Unsentimental: Repositioning the Politics of Art and Education” in Red Hook Journal (2011); “Screw (Down) The Debt: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Austerity” in Mute (2010); “You Are Here” for Manifesta 8 (2010).

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