The Public School New York presents
Towards Neomaterialism: baricades vs. shipping containers
February 16, 2012 @ 7:30pm
Hannes Eisler Nail Salon (H.E.N.S.), corner of 3rd Ave and Bergen, Brooklyn
A class with Joshua Simon, Vera List Fellow, who’ll be joining us in class on 2/13.
An open discussion following some ideas on Neomaterialism run by Joshua Simon, curator and writer and a 2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellow, who is researching expanded notions of Thingness as part of his fellowship.
Some of the topics to be discussed – How come symbols behave like materials (“fake” and “real” brands)? Why have commodities become the historical subject (we furnish our world with IKEA or rather we dwell in its world)? Are humans reduced to simply absorbing surpluses (baby diapers are a form of child labor)? How labor has shifted from production to consumption and why is everything we do is work (even when we are not employed)?
Re-introducing different notions of materialism into the already established conversation on the subjectivity of things, Neomaterialism relates the investigation which the new-materialists have begun, relating it to labor, debt, credit, life-taxes and social organization.
Taking its subtitle from the events of Occupy The Ports (12.12.11), the discussion will touch upon animism and alienation, the overqualified generation and the promise of the Dividual, through recent texts on Neomaterialism by Joshua Simon which have been published with e-flux journal together with Thorstein Veblen’s 1898 “The Beginning of Ownership“.
Related images here.