Speculative Realism Accelerationism and Aesthetics

David Joselit

David Joselit is Distinguished Professor in the Art History PhD Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has taught at the University of California, Irvine, and Yale University where he was Department Chair from 2006-09. Joselit is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012). He is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture.

Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Theory and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches political theory and American political thought. She is the author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of ThingsThe Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and EthicsThoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the WildThe Politics of Moralizing and In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment.

Anselm Franke

Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Brussels and Berlin. He is the Artistic Director of Extra City Center for Contemporary Art in Antwerp, curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012, and he was a co-curator of Manifesta 7 in Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy (2008). Previously, Franke acted as curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin until 2006, where he organized exhibitions such as Territories. Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (2003); Image Archives (2001/2002); The Imaginary Number (2005, together with Hila Peleg), and B-Zone – Becoming Europe and Beyond (2006) and he co-developed the project No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs At Night (2006). Other projects include “Animism” at Extra City, Antwerp and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2010); and “Mimétisme” at Extra City, Antwerp, Belgium (2008). He has edited and published various publications and is a contributor to magazines such as Metropolis M, Piktogram, and Cabinet.

Miguel Abreu

Miguel Abreu is an art dealer and gallerist. He opened his eponymous Orchard Street gallery in 2006, and recently opened a second gallery on 88 Eldridge St, comprised of two 7500 sq ft. loft spaces. Miguel Abreu Gallery represents artists Liz Deschenes, Sam Lewitt, R. H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Pamela Rosenkranz and Blake Rayne, among others. In 2002, Abreu established Foundation 20 21 with Tim Nye, a New York based arts organization and collecting entity with a mission to nourish exchanges among artists, writers, filmmakers, historians and philosophers.

(Photo by Florian Kleinefenn & Hervé Véronèse, Le Nouveau festival du Centre Pompidou, 2013)

Margaret Lee

Margaret Lee is an artist, curator, and dealer who is prolific among interconnected endeavors; she creates her own work, collaborates with other artists, and runs a New York City gallery space. Though thriving on constant collaboration with other artists, in her personal work Lee explores the idea of the readymade object, working by hand to create artwork that strays from mass-production. For example, in hand-painted replicas of potatoes, Lee individually cast the vegetables from single molds, thus preventing the creation of editions. She often assembles her objects in disparate pairs, such as a watermelon and a boot. Lee says her practice was greatly informed by Ed Ruscha’s book Babycakes with Weights (1970), wherein he playfully juxtaposed an infant with succeeding pages of various cakes.

Anicka Yi

Anicka Yi creates tactile and fragrant sculptures, paintings, and installations, employing materials such as soaps, potato chips, milk, and hair gel, that play on the paradox between the enduring, timelessness of art, and ideas of impermanence. Her soap paintings act as a statement on the cosmetics and body-related industries, while their scents disrupt expectations of experiential art. By combining ingredients, she draws on associations and memories, such as that of a freshly scrubbed kitchen in Auras, Orgasms, and Nervous Peaches (2011), in which fragrant olive oils leak from the walls of a tiled room. She is interested in connections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolism.

Yates Mckee

Climate Action Lab Fellow

Yates Mckee is an art critic and PhD candidate in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center. His writing has appeared in venues including October, Grey Room, Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal, Texte Zur Kunst, and The Nation. He was an editor of the movement magazine Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy and has worked with groups including Strike Debt, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, NYC2Palestine, Flood Wall Street, and Rising Tide New York. He is co-editor of Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism (Zone Books, 2012), and his book Art After Occupy is forthcoming from Verso this Fall.

John Miller

John Miller is Professor of Professional Practice in Barnard College’s Art History Department, and an artist and writer based in New York and Berlin. His work was recently included in the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition, “The Human Factor: the Figure in Contemporary Sculpture” and in the Hammer Museum’s “Take It or Leave It: Image. Institution. Ideology.” In 2011 Miller received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Society for Contemporary Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.  Afterall Books has just published his study Mike Kelley: Educational Complex as part of its One Work series.  

(Photo by John Miller)

Liam Considine

Liam Considine is an art historian and critic based in New York. His research is focused on postwar and contemporary art in the United States and France. He has taught art history and critical theory at New York University, The New School and Hunter College. His writing has appeared in The Toronto Review of Books, ArtReview, caa.reviews, Artforum.com and Art Journal.

Sam Sackeroff

Sam Sackeroff is a PhD candidate and SSHRC doctoral fellow in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. During the 2014-2015 academic year he will be a Mellon MRC Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. His current research focuses on liberalism and aesthetics in postwar America.