Let Those Artists Speak

There are times when we wish we were still in school.  No, we aren’t talking about the recess and naptime days of elementary school, but rather those hazy college days when we could schedule classes only on Tuesdays and Thursdays if we pleased.  Or refuse to take a class before noon.  Oh, how college prepared us for the real world.

Well, we are starting to yearn for those days more so, mostly because USC has some awfully tempting artist lectures as of late.

Last night, artist and writer Vito Acconci participated in USC’s Master of Public Art Studies’ Critical Conversation program. Acconci is widely known for his infamous piece Seedbed, in which the artist lay underneath a ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery.  While visitors walked over the ramp, he vocalized his…erm…fantasies about them via a loudspeaker.

Today, Martha Rosler, an artist and writer, will speak as part of the MFA’s lecture series. Rosler’s work tends to focus on women’s experience of daily life and within the public sphere.  You can see her piece Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) above. Her performance mimics a home cooking show, but instead of whipping up a tasty dish, she demonstrates the function of various kitchen tools that becomes violent at times.

[February 24, 12:00- 2:00pm; Lecture Forum Graduate Fine Arts Building, 3001 S. Flower Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007]

If you decide to stick around until the evening, the undergraduate lecture series is going to screen Beautiful Losers, a film that focuses on an artist group in the early 1990s that found inadvertent success in the art and commercial world.  Some of these Beautiful Losers include Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Geoff McFetridge, Harmony Korine, and Shepard Fairey.  Afterward, filmmaker Aaron Rose will speak.

[7:00-9:30pm; University Park Campus, Harris Hall, Gin D. Wong Auditorium, HAR 101]