Subject to Security: Tishan Hsu and Julia Scher
Abstract
This lecture surveys work by Tishan Hsu, Julia Scher and others during the late 1980s and 1990s, as artists integrated emerging theories of information with expanded approaches to object, moving-image and installation-based work. Although drawing upon different media—Hsu working with wall reliefs, prints and floor sculptures, Scher in video installation and net.art—these artists proposed new ways of reconstituting subjectivity in a transition between a televisual and digital era that transformed available concepts of public-private space, physical and informational selfhood. Seen against advances in ergonomics, polymers and personal computing, and recently available theories of embodiment and surveillance, pain and power, Hsu and Scher’s art are examined here for their reconstructions of embodied experience in an age of control.
About Jeannine Tang
Jeannine Tang is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at The New School in New York, where she teaches contemporary art and exhibition history. She has published widely in “Artforum,” “Art Journal,” “Journal of Visual Culture,” “Theory, Culture & Society” in addition to numerous anthologies and catalogs. In 2018, with Lia Gangitano and Ann Butler, she co-curated the exhibition “The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004)” at the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and co-edited the accompanying book. She is a 2020 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant.