Designing in Dark Times: an Arendtian Lexicon

To celebrate the release of Designing in Dark Times: an Arendtian Lexicon, we are organizing a series of dialogues to further explore what “dark times” means today and design’s recent positioning towards the expanded field of the society within it through an Arendtian lens.

Each Dialogue will convene several of the book’s contributors to discuss connections between design, politics, and philosophy for acting and designing against, within, and through dark times.

This session will feature Liesbeth Huybrechts (Common Interests), Andrew Shea (Human Rights), Andrea Botero (Humanity), Eric Gordon (Play), and Caroline Dionne (Speech) with the mediation of the book’s editors Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari.

Join us on Zoom this coming Wednesday, 14 April, 12:00 ET in this conversation about our present, universal moment navigating darkness, light, and the many shades in between. Register at https://bit.ly/indarktimes_5.

 

About the Book:
Edited by Eduardo Staszoswki and Virginia Tassinari, “Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon” gathers 56 terms drawn from Hannah Arendt’s writings as entry points for authors to explore what “dark times” means today and design’s recent positioning towards the expanded field of the society within it. The book is part of the “Designing in Dark Times” series, published by Bloomsbury, which investigates design’s capacity to offer critical and transformative perspectives on our contemporary condition.

Guy Debord’s Game of War: A Conversation With Emmanuel Guy

Thursday, November 14
6:00 pm
Kellen Auditorium
66 5th Avenue

We know Guy Debord (1931-1994) as a poet, filmmaker, artist, revolutionary theorist, editor and founder of the Situationist International avant-garde movement. But above all else, he was a strategist: poetry, cinema, theory and the avant-garde were, for Debord, means to be deployed in a struggle against the society of his age. To sharpen his strategic instincts and those of his potential comrades, Debord designed a game, the Jeu de la guerre (Game of War), which consisted of a gridded board and a set of pieces representing the various units of an army. Through an exploration of the genealogies, contexts, gameplay and contemporary uses of this object, Emmanuel Guy proposes to consider the implications of this unique ludic and social object for our understanding of Debord, and what lessons might be gleaned from a Situationist art of war.

Emmanuel Guy is a researcher, curator and Assistant Professor of Art and Design History at Parsons Paris The New School.

Presented by the Art and Design History and Theory Program at Parsons School of Design

ADHT Dean, Rhonda Garelick, Joins Bard Graduate Center for BGC Late: Jazz & Conversation in the Gallery

BGC LATE: JAZZ & CONVERSATION IN THE GALLERY:
WOMEN DESIGNERS: CHANEL, LANVIN, BOUÉ SŒURS AND JEANNE PAQUIN

Bard Graduate Center Gallery
18 West 86th Street New York, NY 10024
Thursday October 10, 2019 6:00  – 8:00 pm
*free, registration required

Join The Bard Graduate Center for BGC Late: Jazz & Conversation in the Gallery. See the exhibitions and learn from provocative conversations about the objects on view. Gene Perla and the musicians he brings together start playing at 6 pm. At 7:00 pm, fashion scholars Waleria DorogovaRhonda Garelick, Mellissa Huber and Jan Glier Reeder lead a conversation about women designers, including Gabrielle Chanel, Jeanne Lanvin, Boué Sœurs and Jeanne Paquin. Music Provided by: Troy Roberts (Sax), Rachel Z ( Piano), Gene Perla (Bass) and Clarence Penn (Drums)

Waleria Dorogova is a historian and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bonn, where she studied Art History and Classical Archaeology. Now based in Vienna, she currently works at the interdisciplinary project Austrian Center for Fashion Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Prior, she was curator of the Goldsmiths Textile Collection and worked for Kerry Taylor Auctions, as well as an independent researcher. Her research and publications center around early twentieth-century haute couture, Russian diaspora in Paris fashion and international relations in fashion. The subject of her dissertation is the history of the Franco-American fashion house Boué Sœurs (1897-1957).

Rhonda Garelick is the Dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons/The New School. She is the author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (Random House, 2014); Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2007); Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 1998); and co-editor of Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self (University of Nebraska Press, 2010). Her column, “Reading the Signs” appears regularly in The Cut (New York Magazine), and she her cultural criticism appears often in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Brooklyn Rail, and other venues. She is a Guggenheim fellow and has also received awards from the NEA, the NEH, the Getty Research Institute, the Dedalus Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Whiting Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Mellissa Huber is assistant curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and specializes in twentieth-century fashion. Since joining the Museum in 2012, she has assisted the department with research and content development for numerous special exhibitions, including Punk: Chaos to Couture (2013); Charles James: Beyond Fashion (2014); Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire (2014); China: Through the Looking Glass (2015); Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style (2015); Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology (2016); Masterworks: Unpacking Fashion (2016); Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and The Catholic Imagination (2018); and the forthcoming In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection (2019).

Jan Glier Reeder is a fashion historian and consulting curator for the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Music for BGC Late: Jazz & Conversation in the Gallery is guest curated by musician Gene Perla. Perla was raised in New Jersey where he studied classical piano and trombone. After attending Berklee School of Music, he moved to New York and began his musical career as a jazz bassist. He has performed and/or recorded with Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman, Elvin Jones, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Chuck Mangione, Joni Mitchell, Buddy Rich, Sonny Rollins, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Stone Alliance, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, and others.

Playing The Auditorium – Kabir Carter

Playing The Auditorium
Kabir Carter

October 2, 2019, 5:00 PM to 6:15 PM
The Auditorium (Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall)
The New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York

Register Here: https://sched.co/TsD1

This event celebrates the sonic possibilities of one of The New School’s oldest and most stunning spaces. Designed in the 1930s by legendary architect Joseph Urban, The Auditorium has served as the venue for notable lectures and performances including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1964 speech “The Summer of Our Discontent.” In a 2004 article, the New York Times described the auditorium as “one of the city’s great modern interiors,” an “egg-shaped room [that] focuses on a broad, arched proscenium,” with a “delicate, layered ceiling” “painted in nine tones of gray.”

Contemporary sound artist Kabir Carter will evoke the architecture and history of this auditorium in performing a unique sound composition, using the space not simply as a site for performance but as an instrument to be played. Sound technicians who have worked at the auditorium over the years have been invited to participate in the performance.

Kabir Carter has physically interrogated and spatially expanded the acoustic and durational limits of performing with microphones. He has installed temporary sound works in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations in several cities. His interests include architectural acoustics, the transmission of sound across medium boundaries, and the affective potentialities of sound-in-space. Carter has been a fellow at Hochschule Für Bildende Kunste Braunschweig and resident at Aalto Acoustics Lab at Aalto University, and LMCC Workspace Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. His work has been presented and exhibited at: Nokia Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ;  HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He holds an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Organized By: Caroline Dionne & Sreshta Rit Premnath
AV and Technical Support: Brian Kase & Sylvan Simon

Designing after the Designing is Done

Program Contact

Caroline Dionne, Program Director

Program Update

Parsons is not currently admitting new students to this master’s degree program. Parsons is now offering a Graduate Minor in Design Studies that is designed to complement the MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies and other graduate programs across the university in design, liberal arts, and social research.