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# 91

A First Step Towards a Regional Risk Assessment

Michael Baers

Preface Late in March of this year I attended a lecture by Professor Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where she presented a collaborative project, the Feral Atlas, an online repository of stories about the Anthropocene and how humans and nonhumans together make worlds at scale. In her introductory remarks, she spoke of the demand often put forward by humanist colleagues to tell hopeful stories about the Anthropocene rather than view it as an undifferentiated…

e-flux Journal

Posted: May 9, 2018

Category

Nature & Ecology, Capitalism

Subjects

Anthropocene, Climate change

# 39

Michael Asher (1943–2012): Parting Words and Unfinished Work

Michael Baers

1. Early in the afternoon of Wednesday, October 17, I got a call from a friend and fellow alumnus of CalArts with the news that Michael Asher had passed away. I set down the phone and quickly scanned the obituaries in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times . And then that sinking feeling set in. I had not been in contact with Michael for some years, but in the nature of a death both expected and untimely (I was aware he was in poor health), I was not prepared for how the news…

e-flux Journal

Posted: November 1, 2012

Subjects

Conceptual & Post-Conceptual Art, Memorials & Obituaries

# 34

No Good Time for an Exhibition: Reflections on the Picasso in Palestine Project, Part II

Michael Baers

→ Continued from “No Good Time for an Exhibition: Reflections on the Picasso in Palestine Project, Part I.” The poems, at least in translation, left me unmoved, except for the beauty of the calligraphy. They were about struggle and disaster, but I couldn’t make anything of the imagery, which was all about doves and damsels and honey. —Jean Genet 1 1. The Usual Form of Events For the official opening five days later, Khaled Hourani staged a gala event. Buste de…

e-flux Journal

Posted: April 1, 2012

Category

War & Conflict, Image, Photography, Colonialism & Imperialism

Subjects

Middle East, Museology, Exhibition Histories, Palestine

# 33

No Good Time for an Exhibition: Reflections on the Picasso in Palestine Project, Part I

Michael Baers

There is no vision without details. —Hussein Barghouti The psychic and geographical center of Ramallah is Al Manarah Square, a traffic roundabout where five streets converge at irregular angles. Cars and people circulate in apparent chaos around five carved lions statues—symbolizing Ramallah’s five prominent families—which encircle a single Corinthian column, as if standing guard. One lion wears a wristwatch, and depending on one’s sense of the ironic, this detail can be read…

e-flux Journal

Posted: March 1, 2012

Category

War & Conflict

Subjects

Middle East, Museology, Exhibition Histories, Palestine, State & Government

# 26

Inside the Box: Notes From Within the European Artistic Research Debate

Michael Baers

1. Setting the Stage December 4, 2010, Murcia, Spain. The lights had come on in the auditorium following a screening of As the Academy Turns , Tion Ang’s telenovela-style exposé of machinations in the contemporary art academy, and it was time for the obligatory Q&A. The audience, professors of art and their PhD students, cautiously assayed questions concerning methodology and budget, but Ang, in the grips of an apparent somnambulism, hazarded vaguely mechanical answers and…

e-flux Journal

Posted: June 1, 2011

Category

Education, Gender, Contemporary Art

Subjects

Academia, Racism, Europe, Artistic Research