Transmission: Jesse Aron Green & the History About to Happen
Join us for a scholar lecture by Michael Jay McClure, associate professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
In Jesse Aron Green’s video installation Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik, (Medicalized Indoor Gymnastics) (2008), a group of sixteen men congress to perform the supposedly improving nineteenth-century exercises of the notorious Saxon physician Daniel Gottlob Möritz Schreber. As the recreation of a historic form of exercise, then, one of the work’s obvious subjects is history and its transmission. Accordingly, this lecture will consider what it means to re-broadcast and re-perform historical forms and will explore how such recreations may not serve to recover some imagined past, but may, instead, speak to the present situation of their broadcast. Ultimately, the lecture will attempt to diagram, through Green’s piece, a kind of history that is fractious and mutable, to be sure, but will also outline a history that might continue to happen, even yet, in unknowable futures.
About Michael Jay McClure
Michael Jay McClure is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and specializes in contemporary art and theory.
His writing has appeared in Discourse, Art Journal, Performance Research, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, among other venues, and he recently contributed to the catalogue for the major exhibition "Warhol’s Nature."
He was written on everyone from Barnett Newman to Matthew Barney and Trisha Donnelly, and is completing the manuscript Proposition: Contemporary Art in the Instructional Mode.
Sponsored in part by Frances P. Rohlen Visiting Artists Fund/College of Fine + Applied Arts, School of Art + Design Visitors Fund, and Krannert Art Museum
