Weintz Art Lecture Series: Rosalyn Deutsche

The Department of Art & Art History's J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series presents "Christopher D’Arcangelo’s Elliptical Interruptions," a lecture by Rosalyn Deutsche, professor of art history at Barnard College.

In 1975, a very young artist named Christopher D’Arcangelo chained himself to the main doors of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year, he staged related guerilla performances at the city’s other major art museums. These actions, occupations, or demonstration/questions, as D’Arcangelo variously called them, were an important contribution to the developing art practice of institutional critique. All involved the artist’s bodily presence and all included a topsy-turvy statement about anarchism, often stenciled on his bare back. Drawing on the insights of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Paolo Virno, this talk explores D’Arcangelo’s museum actions as engagements in spatial politics that called for art institutions to open themselves to the vulnerability that is essential to democracy. 

Rosalyn Deutsche is an art historian and critic who teaches modern and contemporary art at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York City. She has written extensively and lectured internationally on such interdisciplinary topics as art and urbanism, art and the public sphere, art and war, art and psychoanalysis, and feminist theories of subjectivity in representation. Her essays have appeared in Grey Room, October, Artforum, Art in America, and Society and Space, among other journals, in many exhibition catalogues and anthologies, and in numerous translations. Deutsche is the author of Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics and Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War.

This lecture series is made possible by a generous grant from Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz

Photo by Cathy Weiner, Christopher D'Arcangelo Papers, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University.

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