Platform:
Christopher Heuer ‘The Vagrant Aesthetic’
+ Book Launch: Andrea Büttner ‘Beggars’
13 October 2018, 14:00
Join us for a talk by Christopher Heuer (Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, US) that explores old and new ideas of the “poor” image. The Liber Vagatorum is a sixteenth-century book that was written to describe and warn of vagabonds. The book and its illustrations reflect the transformation of age-old ideas of charity during the Protestant Reformation, in which conceptions of responsibility and care significantly changed.
Drawing on these images and other examples of depictions of poverty and their contexts, Heuer will examine how these troubling pictures resonate today, in art practice and a society of constant precarity. The talk is organized to coincide with the release of Andrea Büttner’s publication Beggars, which collects the research by the artist on the representation of poverty, with new contributions by Anne Carson, Christopher P. Heuer and Linda Nochlin.
Christopher P. Heuer is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester (US), where he teaches in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. He has held appointments as Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Kunsthistorisch Instituut of the Rijksuniversiteit (Leiden, The Netherlands), Henkel-Stifting Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität (Berlin, Germany), and posts in Departments of Art & Archaeology at Columbia University (2005-2007) and Princeton University (2007-2014). Until 2017, he directed the Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program (Williamstown, Massachusetts). Heuer is the author of The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (New York and Oxford 2009), and a co-author of Vision and Communism (New York, 2011). His new book about the Renaissance arctic, Into the White, will appear with Zone Books/MIT Press in early 2019. Heuer is a founding member of Our Literal Speed, an art and media collective based in Selma, Alabama, US.