Organizers:
Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the Program in Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh, in cooperation with the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Center for Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, the Warhol Museum and the Mattress Factory.

Pittsburgh Symposium Committee:
Terry Smith, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory; Okwui Enwezor, Director of Documenta 11 and Visiting Professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture; Nancy Condee, Director of the Program in Cultural Studies, Colin McCabe, University Distinguished Professor of English, all University of Pittsburgh; Laura Hoptman, Curator of the Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art.

Pittsburgh Partners:
Tom Sokolowski, Director, Andy Warhol Museum; Judith Modell, Center for Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University; Jennifer Baron, Mattress Factory.

Distinguished Scholars:
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. His best-known and most recent writings include Political Unconscious (1981); Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992); and A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002).

Bruno Latour has written Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts (1986), Science in Action (1987), and The Pasteurization of France (1988).  He also published a field study on an automatic subway system, Aramis or the Love of Technology (1992), and an essay on symmetric anthropology, We have never been modern (1993).  He also published a series of essays, Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies (1999). In a series of books in French, he has been exploring the consequences of social studies on different traditional topics of the social sciences: religion in Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, and Jubiler ou les tournments de la parole religieuse (2002); and social theory in Paris ville invisible (1998). After a long field work on one of the French supreme Courts, he just published a monograph, La Fabrique du droit-une ethnographie du Conseil d'Etat (2002). Since 1982, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and in the History of Science Department of Harvard University. After having curated an exhibition Iconoclash (2002), he is currently preparing another exhibition in ZKM also with Peter Weibel Making Things Public due to open in 2005.

Antonio Negri, Italy's best-known contemporary moral and political philosopher, is author of Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999); with Michael Hardt, Empire (2000), Time for Revolution (2003).

Boris Groys is Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (Germany).  His major publications include The Total Art of Stalinism (1992); On the New: Essay on Cultural Economy (1992); Utopia and Exchange (1993); Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media (2000); Politics of Immortality (2002); Topology of Art (2003); and most recently, with Max Hollein, Dream Factory Communism (2003).  He is author of over a hundred articles, which have appeared in such wide-ranging periodicals as Art in America, A Ia (Paris), Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sintaksis, Les Cahiers du Musee national d'art moderne, Iskusstvo, Voprosy filosofii, and elsewhere.  He has held positions as a Fellow at the Harvard University Art Museum, as Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts (Vienna), and as Visiting Scholar in Cinema Studies at New York University.

Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History in the Department of Art History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is also the founder and first director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, as well as the Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum. In 1999 and 2000 he curated Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century and Canceled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China. He was the chief curator of the First Guangzhou Triennial entitled Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Art in China (1990-2000). His most recent publications on contemporary art include Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West (2001); Rong Rong's East Village (2003); and the monumental, bilingual catalogue of the First Guangzhou Triennial (2002).

Geeta Kapur is an independent art critic and curator living in Delhi. Her writings include exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, the book Contemporary Indian Artists (1978) and a series of widely anthologized essays on art, film and cultural theory, now published under the title, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000). More recently, she has co-curated, "Bombay/ Mumbai 1992-2001" in the multi-part exhibition titled, Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, at the Tate Modern, London, 2001; and curated subTerrain: artworks in the cityfold, at the House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2003. She is a founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas and advisory editor to Third Text and Marg. She has lectured world-wide and held research fellowships at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi. In the academic year 2004-05, she will be Visiting Fellow at the University of Delhi, and at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Rosalind Krauss is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. A specialist in 20th-century art, she has published Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (1971), Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné (1977), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), Le Photographique (1990), Cindy Sherman (1993), The Optical Unconscious (1993), Formless: A User's Guide (1997), The Picasso Papers (1998) and Bachelors (1999). As guest curator, she organized the exhibition Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields for the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, originated L'Amour fou: Surrealism and Photography at the Corcoran Museum (1985), curated Richard Serra/Sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art (1986), and the Guggenheim's retrospective Robert Morris: the Mind/Body Problem. With Yve-Alain Bois she organized L'Informe: Mode d'emploi for the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1996. A member of the editorial board of Artforum magazine during the 1960s, she left in 1975 to found, along with Annette Michelson, the journal October. There, too, the task of writing and publishing is understood as forging a relationship between contemporary concerns and scholarship, for October has, from its inception, conceived of criticism as an act of opening the history of modernism to theory, that is, to an examination of its fundamental premises.

Robert Storr is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Formerly he was a Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1990-1999 and Senior Curator in the Department from 1999-2002. Among his exhibitions at MoMA include are Max Beckmann (2003), organized with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Tate Gallery, London; Gerhard Richter: 40 years of Painting (2002), Making Choices (2000), in collaboration with curators from all departments of MoMA; Chuck Close (1998), Tony Smith: Painter, Architect, Sculptor (1998), Mapping (1994) Robert Ryman (1993), in collaboration with the Tate Gallery;, and DIS LOCATIONS (1991-92).  He also organized Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (SITE Santa Fe 2005); Jörg Immendorff:  I Wanted to Become an Artist, in collaboration with Pamela Kort at the Moore College of Art (2005); The Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties, Institute of Contemporary Art (1991-92) and Susan Rothenberg:15 Years - a Survey, Rooseum, Malmö Sweden (1990). Mr. Storr is the author of Philip Guston (1986); Chuck Close (1987), and Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois (forthcoming). He has recently written catalog essays for exhibitions by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vija Celmins, Eva Hesse, Guillermo Kuitca, Barry Le Va, Steve McQueen, Martin Puryear, Robert Ryman, Pierreck Sorin, and Nancy Spero. Mr. Storr is a Contributing Editor of Grand Street and Art in America, where his articles on Sigmar Polke, Elizabeth Murray, Francesco Clemente, Brice Marden, Leon Golub, Yvonne Rainer and many others have appeared since 1982. Mr. Storr  writes a column as well as frequent articles for Art Press (Paris), a column for Frieze (London) and his criticism has also been regularly featured in Artforum, Parkett, and others publications. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice. A member of the Editorial Board of the College Art Association's Art Journal (1985-1995), he co-edited two issues of the magazine devoted to censorship in arts. A frequent lecturer in this country and abroad, Mr. Storr has taught painting, drawing, art history and criticism at numerous colleges, universities and art schools. His exhibitions have been supported by the NEA, The Norton Family Foundation, and many public and private patrons. He personally has been the recipient of a Penny McCall Foundation Grant, Norton Family Foundation Curators Grant, honorary Doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maine College of Art, as well as awards from the American Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, including first place for the best monographic show in New York City 2001-2002 for Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, and a special AICA award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Art Criticism (2004). In 2003 he was named the recipient of the ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award given by Independent Curators International, and in 2004 he received Lawrence A. Flesichman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. In 2000 the French Ministry of Culture presented him with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. He holds honorary degrees from The Art Institute of  Chicago and the Maine College of Art, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.


Young Minds:
Monica Amor is Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Last fall she was Lemann Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She has written for Art Nexus, Art in America, Documents, the Art Journal, and Third Text and is currently working on a book on The Crisis of Geometric Abstraction in the Americas.

Iwona Blazwick Iwona Blazwick is Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Until 2001, she was Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Modern. From 1993 to 1997, she was Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon Press, where she created the ongoing book series, Contemporary Artists Monographs and Themes and Movements. Iwona Blazwick teaches occasionally at Goldsmiths School of Art, Central St. Martins, Middlesex University, the Slade School and Sothebys MA Course. Her writings include contributions to monographs on Hannah Collins, Ceal Floyer, Katharina Fritsch, Ilya Kabakov, Cornelia Parker, Lawrence Weiner and Rachel Whiteread among others; and anthologies such as Fresh Cream in 2001. She was editor of the Tate Modern Handbook and Century City. She is also a broadcaster contributing occasional reviews and commentaries for BBC and Channel Four television and BBC radio. Iwona Blazwick has been on numerous juries, including the Turner Prize in 1993, the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1997, and as a member of Ohio's Wexner Center's International Arts Advisory Council, the Wexner Prize for 2002.

Nicolas Bourriaud is Co-Director at Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and creator/director of the magazine Documents. His publications include Relational Aesthetics (1988) and Postproduction (2001). His recent curated exhibitions include Contacts (Kunsthalle Fri-Art, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2000); Touch (San Francisco Art Institute, 2002); GNS (Palais de Tokyo, 2003); and Playlist (Palais de Tokyo, 2004). He is currently preparing the first Moscow biennale for January 2005.

Darby English is assistant professor of art history at the University of Chicago, where he teaches postwar American art. Formerly, he served as assistant director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. Published work includes Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (2002), a book he co-edited, and several essays and articles that, among other subjects, follow his interest in the reception of modernity and modernism by late twentieth and early twenty-first-century artists and writers.

Jonathan Hay is Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts (New York University). He is author of Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (2001) and, with Alice Yang, Why Asia?: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art (1998). A specialist of Chinese art, he writes on a wide range of periods and mediums. Recurrent concerns include the identification of modes of artistic modernity that escape Euro-American paradigms, a narratological understanding of modernity as one historical narrative among others, and an exploration of the theoretical and thematic dimensions of the intercultural.

Lev Manovich  <www.manovich.net> is Associate Professor at the Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego where he teaches new media art, theory, and criticism. His publications include The Language of New Media ( 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (1993), and Info-Aesthetics (forthcoming). Currently Manovich is directing a five year project Soft Cinema, that mines the creative possibilities at the  intersection of software culture, cinema, and digital architecture. A DVD that presents three films developed within the project will be published by The MIT Press in early 2005.

James Meyer is the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) and editor of Minimalism (2000), and a frequent contributor to Artforum. He is currently Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University.

Gao Minglu is a leading authority on Chinese art of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has curated the Chinese section of Conceptual Art: Point of Origin. 1950s-1980s Exhibition (Queens Museum); Five Continents and One City (Museum of Mexico); Inside Out: New Chinese Art (San Francisco MOMA). His publications include Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile (1993) and Chinese Avant-Garde Art: The History of Contemporary Chinese Art.

Helen Molesworth is the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She is currently working on an exhibition with Zoe Leonard, as well as a major exhibition of transatlantic sculpture produced in the wake of Marcel Duchamp's erotic objects entitled Part Object Part Sculpture. From 2000-2003 she was the Curator of Contemporary Art at The Baltimore Museum of Art, where she organized Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post-1960s art, and BodySpace, which explored the legacy of Minimalism for contemporary artists. She is the author of numerous articles and her writing has appeared in publications such as Art Journal, Documents, and October. Her research areas are concentrated largely within and around the problems of feminism, the reception of Marcel Duchamp, and the socio-historical frameworks of contemporary art.

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie is a historian of modern African art (University of California, Santa Barbara) with an extensive scholarly background in Classical, Contemporary and Diaspora African arts. A painter and art critic, Ogbechie evaluates the impact of colonial and postcolonial regimes of representation on the visual culture of African and African Diaspora populations. He has curated several groundbreaking exhibitions of modern African art in Nigeria, Germany and the United States and has also participated in solo and group exhibitions in these places. His articles and reviews have appeared in African Arts, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Revue Noire, and Ijele. Ogbechie is currently completing a book-length manuscript titled Ideology of Form in 20th Century African Art. He is also working on an exhibition of modern African art scheduled to open in 2006.

Nikos Papastergiadis is Director of the Australia Center, University of Melbourne. He was formerly Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts; lecturer and Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester; Visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art; advisor to the Moscow School of Social Science; and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Fine Arts & Cinema Studies, University of Melbourne. His research and writing has focused on cultural theory and artistic practice in relation to place, migration and globalization. Recent work has focused on the transformation of urban environment in post industrial cities. His publications include The Turbulence of Migration (2000); Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity (1998); and Modernity as Exile (1993).

Colin Richards has presented and published papers on contemporary South African art in South Africa, North America, Europe, India, Japan, Australia, Norway, England and Scotland.  As well as being consultant for a number of local and international exhibitions involving South African art and artists, he co-curated Taking Liberties: The Body Politic for the Johannesburg Africus Biennal of 1995, and Siyawela: Love, Loss, and Liberation in Art from South Africa at the Birmingham City Art Museum (England) for Africa 95 in the same year.  In 1997 he curated Grafti at the South African National Gallery as part of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial.  Colin is also a practising artist, and has exhibited in South Africa, England and North America.  His work is represented in most of the major public collections in the country, including the South African National Gallery and Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Suely Rolnick is a cultural critic, schizoanalyst and full professor at the Universidade Católica de São Paulo where she conducts a transdisciplinary doctoral program on contemporary subjectivity.  She is co-author with Félix Guattari of Micropolitica: Cartografias do desejo (1986), 7th ed. rev., 2005; (English translation forthcoming 2005)  Guest editor of the Spanish art magazine Zehar no. 51 (2003: dedicated to her essay "Creation quits its pimp to rejoin resistance"); of the Canadian magazine Parachute no. 116 (2004; issue about visual arts in São Paulo); and of the Brazilian Cadernos de Subjetividade (1996; issue about Gilles Deleuze). Author of the archival project "25 Years of Lygia Clark's Event-Work" (2004-5) sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture, and curator of the related exhibition at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Nantes (2005).  Among her translations into Portuguese: Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus (vol.III/IV).  She has published numerous essays in journals and art catalogues in Europe and the Americas, and has lectured widely (Documenta X, 1997). PUC (Brazil). Relevant publications include the exhibition catalogue for Lygia Clark retrospective exhibit (1997); the catalogue for the XXIV Bienal de São PauloCorpo Vibrátil. Sete Ensaios sobre arte e subjetividade e Cartografia Sentimental. Transformações contemporâneas do desejo (2002).

Charity Scribner teaches at MIT, where she is Assistant Professor of European Studies in the Section of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Her first book is Requiem for Communism (2003); she also had contributed to Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, and Weimarer Beiträge. For Documenta 11 she organized Platforms I and II in Berlin, Vienna, and New Delhi.

McKenzie Wark <wark@newschool.edu> teaches at the New School University in New York City.  He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004), Dispositions (2002), Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (1999), Virtual Republic (1997), Virtual Geography (1994) and co-author of Speed Factory (2002).

Conveners:
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles). From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Sydney. He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (1993) and Transformations in Australian Art, vols. 1-2 (2002). He is currently working on The Architecture of Aftermath: Spectacle and the Specular after Modernity ; What is Contemporary Art? ; and Looking through Degas. A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. He is also a Vice-President and Member of the Bureau of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art.

Okwui Enwezor is Visiting Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh and the Artistic Director of Documenta11, Kassel, Germany. He is the founder and publisher of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, a critical art journal co-published by the Africana Studies Center at Cornell University and was the Artistic Director of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997). He has recently curated exhibitions including The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 at the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, the Martin-Gropius Bau and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 (2001-2002). Recent publications include Democracy Unrealized (2002); Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation; Creolité and Creolization (2002). He is co-producer of Western Deep and Carib's Leap (2002), two films by the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen.

Nancy Condee is Director of the Program for Cultural Studies and on the faculty of the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Publications include Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late 20c. Russia (1995); Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (2000); and a current project on contemporary Russian cinema (in progress).  Her work has appeared The Nation, The Washington Post, October, New Left Review, Sight and Sound, as well as major Russian cultural journals (Znamia, Voprosy literatury, Iskusstvo kino). She has worked as a consultant for the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Library of Congress, and Public Broadcasting for several Frontline documentaries and was Executive Producer for a CD-Rom database on Russian cinema, Kino ottepeli (2002). She is Senior Associate Member at St. Antony's (Oxford) and Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the largest US grant agency for federal funding of basic research in the former second world.