Please note that this McKinney lecture, unlike most in the series, takes place on a Thursday.
Two activists hurling soup onto a painting. An artist peeing on another artist’s work. A sculptor spray-painting their own sculpture at the opening of an exhibit. In this lecture, artist Ethan Philbrick pursues such inquiries as why artists and activists deface art works, what does defacement do and not do as an act of political protest, and in an age of participatory art and performance, what are the effects of non-consensual participation and uninvited performance in art institutions?
While defacement is widely discounted as a political tactic for being too individualistic and indirect, this lecture pays close formal attention to recent acts of defacement in order to think some new thoughts for our times about the relationship between art and politics, symbolic action and material action, impotence and intervention, sabotage and strategy, property and the proper.
Cellist, artist, curator, and author of “Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence" (Fordham University Press, April 2023), Ethan Philbrick is curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project, a member of the curatorial collective Offerings, and part of the musical-theatrical project DAYS. He has presented solo and collaborative performances in New York and across the US. The Nation has described Philbrick’s musical performances as “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “extremely strange” and his writing has been characterized as “rich and fascinating” in e-flux. He has taught at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, New York University, Wesleyan College, Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and The New School.
