David Raskin

Name-drop the word ‘space’ in a conversation with an artist, and you’ll be in their good books. That, though, is about as far as a conversation on space can go. Just the one word — space — and nothing more. It has been that way for more than fifty years, since Minimal art’s introduction of ‘actual space’ in the 1960s. It is important—curators, writers and art history lecturers keep telling us. It is historically significant. It is paradigm changing. Yet few can tell us how space works and what its differentiations are. The Missing Space Project aims to redress this lapse in recognising differentiated space in art. These six interviews debate its lack of recognition, the cause and the contemporary necessity of recognising differentiated space in this The Missing Space Project’s first stage. The six interviews are with (in order of appearance): curator Marianne Stockebrand (in Berlin), Minimal art collector Egidio Marzona (in Berlin), Minimal art anthologist Daniel Marzona (in Berlin), art historian Gregor Stemmrich (in Berlin), art historian Richard Shiff (in New York), and curator Renate Wiehager (by correspondence)—with an introduction by Minimal art expert David Raskin.

Ebook: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/missing-space-project-six/id1010191780?mt=13&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

In a practice spanning over two decades, Jose Dávila has consistently contrasted themes of volume and transparency, mass and lightness, the geometric and the organic, the natural, and the industrial. His work encompasses sculpture, cut photographs, paintings, and works on paper. This publication, unfolding as brief vignettes, personal reflections, art-historical interpretations, and critical analysis-knit together with extraordinary images of Dávila's works and installations-forms the most complete and informative picture of the artist and his practice to date.

This first retrospective book on Los Angeles–based artist Sam Falls (born 1984) spans his work from his beginnings in the 2000s to his most recent exhibitions.

Following the traditions of minimalism and land art while pursuing a path toward abstraction, his photographs, paintings, public installations and sculptures have undoubtedly been influenced by nature and the Los Angeles environment in which he lives. Previously a student of physics, linguistics and aesthetics, he has long been interested in how natural phenomena such as light, rain and wind might impact his abstract paintings and sculptures. The idea of a controlled change on materials ranging from steel to cloth creates extraordinary time-based hybridities.

Addresses breadth of Shapiro's career with a particular focus on the small wooden reliefs, 1978-1980, the plaster forms and other works from his residency at the Jerusalem Museum in 1981, and the more recent suspended forms, which he began exploring in 2010.  The focus is on aesthetics of process.

Published excerpt from my 1994 Master's Thesis in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University, supervised by Michele Bogart, and written while I was a concurrent participant in the Whitney ISP under Rosalyn Deutsche. The essay, my FIRST publication, looks at art by Robert Smithson and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, and asks what counts as "nature" and "ecology" in art c. 1970. Intellectual touchstones include Craig Owens, Donna Haraway, Murry Bookchin, and various Marxist thinkers.

Talk at Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Ky.

Recorded on January 25, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWuu15YTVX4

David Chack speaks first, followed by David Raskin at 29:20. Their conversation and the Q&A with the audience begins at 55:30

Exploring Chagall’s life, his revolutionary Jewishness, and his aesthetic of beauty, love, and hope. This panel will demonstrate how Chagall’s work led him to become one of the 20th Century’s greatest artists.

Panelists
David Raskin, Ph.D., is the Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a proud graduate of Kentucky Country Day School. He is the author of Donald Judd, and has contributed to publications from the Tate Modern (London), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), MCA-Chicago, the Ludwig Museum (Cologne), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and Ca’ Pesaro (Venice). His scholarship tells stories of art that probe personal experiences for their wider cultural implications. See more at www.davidraskin.com

David Y. Chack is a professor of Jewish and Holocaust Theatre at The Theatre School at DePaul University. He is also Producing Artistic Director of ShPIeL Theatre in Louisville, Chicago, Los Angeles, and is proud to be opening and directing CHAGALL IN SCHOOL by James Sherman at Kentucky Performing Arts February 8 – 17. He is a theatre consultant for Taube Center for Jewish Life and Learning in Warsaw and the Illinois Holocaust Museum. He initiated and was program curator for the 2016 Museum of the City of New York’s first major exhibition “New York’s Yiddish Theatre: From Bowery To Broadway.” He was nominated for Best Director by Broadway World for “Indecent” at the Henry Clay, Louisville and the last play he produced was “H*tler’s Tasters” at Kentucky Performing Arts. He has written for American Theater, The Forward, HowlRound and the Harold Pinter Review. His B.F.A. is from Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and studied theatre at Circle-in-the-Square Theatre on Broadway. He did Masters work at Tufts University, and Ph.D. work with his mentor Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel at Boston University. He is on the Honorary Board of the Alliance for Jewish Theatre.

March 31, 2020

In this interview Mohn Family professor David Raskin at the School of Art Institute of Chicago talks about the essence of the American artist Donald Judd’s artistry.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents the exhibition Donald Judd from March 1 through July 11, 2020, the first major US retrospective dedicated to Judd in over three decades.

David Raskin has spent more than ten years researching and writing the book Donald Judd about one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the history of sculpture and who still exercises an increasing influence in the field of art, architecture and design.

David Raskin, Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History in conversation with Mimi Plauche, Programming Director of the Chicago International Film Festival, about the 2016 documentary film, "Chris Burden." Sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago's Sustaining Fellows and the Chicago International Film Festival.

Professor David Raskin looks at the photographic work of contemporary Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto.

In asking why responses to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs turn on a dime from awe to scorn, Raskin’s lecture suggest that these strange works of art manage to escape human desires. The hope is that by moving the conversation away from entrenched dichotomies such as aesthetics or anti-aesthetics and toward an analysis of the nature of objects and feelings, the presentation can suggest the ethical and practical consequences of inhuman art.

This Power Lecture was held on 25 May, 2015 as part of the Vivid Ideas. The lecture was co-presented with the University of Sydney’s Sydney Ideas program.

Minimalism Now
Feb 27, 2011
Rachel Harrison, sculptor
Miwon Kwon, Professor of Art History, UCLA
James Meyer, Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University
David Raskin, Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

This panel puts the issue of Minimalism’s morphology and relevance to a noteworthy cast of scholars and artists. Harrison has exhibited internationally in leading venues. Kwon is the author of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002). Meyer is the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (Yale University Press, 2001). Raskin is the author of Donald Judd (Yale University Press, 2010).

David Raskin, School of the Art Institute, explores the relationship of Baltz' photographs to Object Theory, Picture Theory, and other current theoretical explorations in the visual arts. He was introduced by Art Institute curator Matthew S. Witkovsky. This symposium was offered in support of a special exhibition Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit.

Art Institute of Chicago
Public lecture
25 September 2010
David Raskin, School of the Art Institute
Presented as a part of the symposium "Four Pictures—Four Things."
File Length: 23m 05s

Terry Eagleton, 2009, Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Interviewed by David Raskin. n this interview, political and social theorist, Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), shares stories of his Irish upbringing and British education, and sums up his current engagement with art theory, leftist politics, and spirituality under capitalism. With reference to Henry James, Frederic Jameson, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, among others, this interview spans a vast landscape of literature and social theory.

Hal Foster, 2001, Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Interviewed by David Raskin. Hal Foster is Professor of Modern Art at Princeton University, and has written and edited numerous influential books on postmodernism, art, and culture. His books include Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985); The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996); and, as editor, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983); Vision and Visuality (1988); and Richard Serra (2000).

To test or not? No, this book does not weigh the pros and cons of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, or Common Core, the assessment-based education reforms so recently loathed by middle-class America. Rather, it focuses on mid-last- century modernism and the same debate as it played out at Black Mountain College. Díaz’s study is not a comprehensive history of the institution or of its many famous alumni, who include figures as disparate as Robert De Niro, Sr., the Abstract Expressionist painter, and Deborah Sussman, the environmental graphic designer. Instead, the book builds a Venn diagram from cases studies of Joseph Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller, three influential Black Mountain teachers, and then disambiguates their individual models of experimentation.

Terry Eagleton
After Theory
New York: Basic Books, 2003. 240 pp. Cloth $25.00 (0465017738)

David Raskin
July 7, 2004

Cultural theory fiddles while the world burns. It is this perversion that Terry Eagleton hopes to remedy with his newest jeremiad, After Theory ...

Alex Potts
The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 432 pp.; 50 color ills.; 115 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0300088019)

David Raskin
June 27, 2002

In The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, Alex Potts explains the transition from self-contained figurative sculpture to sculpture-in-the-expanded-field as the culmination of two centuries of beliefs that sculpture incites a “distinctive mode of apprehension” (2) from painting.

With Robert Mangold, I enjoyed thinking about what autonomous art might entail. Beyond the routine social constructionist dismissals of this possibility, it obligates considerations more complex than an “Against Interpretation” kind of appeal to raw experience. With their internal sequences rooted in physical reality and construction details, Mangold’s paintings provide objective criteria by which to evaluate them. These criteria count for more than any individual interpretation of them.