Anna O’Meara – Ja ja ja!: Isidore Isou on destroying words and pictures for their realization

The cinema is where words meet moving images in a continuum. Films seamlessly merge music, dialogue, narrative, and images. In 1951, Isidore Isou made a violent attempt to break film’s seamless continuum in Treatise on Drool and Eternity. An inspiration to filmmakers like Stan Brakage and Guy Debord, Isou’s film manifesto was a precursor to both American and French avant-garde art and politics. After working on a new translation of Isou’s film for Annex Press, I will discuss Isou’s methods in breaking traditional art forms in order to create new aesthetic and ideological standards. This discussion will use texts by Isou, many of which are untranslated, that wrestle with the creation of new forms through the deconstruction and reconstruction – through the merging and breaking – of the relationship between text and image in film.

Anna O’Meara is a French to English translator and historian based in Albany, NY. Her translations include a forthcoming publication with Annex Press of Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Drool and Eternity in partnership with translators Ian Thompson of Brisbane, Australia and Nadège LeJeune of Paris, France. She has also translated The Works of Arthur Cravan, which has appeared in Maintenant by Three Rooms Press. O’Meara received her M.A. in Art History from the University of Notre Dame in 2013 for which she wrote The Marxist Critique of Religion in the Films of Guy Debord. Currently, she serves as a Research Assistant to the New York State Historian, Devin Lander. O’Meara has conducted branding research and website development for a New York City production firm, Archivist Media, as well as exhibit development research for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Previously, she served as the Director of Outreach & Development for the Museum Association of New York, and the Assistant Administrator of the Albany County Historical Association.

The 187th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

Patricia Mainardi: Popular Prints to Comics

While popular prints had existed all over Europe for centuries, in the nineteenth-century they evolved into several new genres, including comic strips, children’s literature, and advertising. Subjects for their earliest rural semi-literate audiences, were limited to religion, rulers, crimes and disasters, and homilies, but with advances in printing technology, they began to appeal to an urban and eventually an international audience. These new audiences preferred multi-paneled sheets that abandoned the old verities and instead depicted the whimsical situations typical of modern popular culture in both comic strips and in advertising. This presentation will review the development of popular prints from the earliest examples to comic strips and superheroes.

Patricia Mainardi is an art historian specializing in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her book Another World: Nineteenth-Century European Print Culture was recently published by Yale University Press and discusses the explosion of printed imagery in books, newspapers, comics, and single-sheet images. Previous books include Art and Politics of the Second Empire (Yale University Press, 1987), which was awarded the College Art Association Distinguished Book Award, The End of the Salon (Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Husbands, Wives, and Lovers (Yale University Press, 2003), as well as numerous articles and museum catalogues. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Gallery of Art and the French Institut national de l’histoire de l’art, and was appointed chevalier (knight) in the Ordre des palmes academiques by the French government. This year she received the College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. She is professor emeritus in the Doctoral Program in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

The 186th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 25, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Twister Artwork above: ART©AnaMouyis

Earth Week: Beyond Polar Bears
Presentation and Stipend Awards

Wednesday, April 19, 2017 at 10:00 am to 11 am
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, I-202
55 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011

The images will be presented between 10:00 and 11:00 am during the Tishman Environment and Design Center interactive showcase of community-based participatory research led by New School faculty and students addressing the impacts of climate change.

Images will be shared during the first presentation. This is the culmination of a year long project and a great deal of work on your student’s part. If it is at all possible, please excuse this student to join the event, for this hour where faculty grant winners and student scholars will share their research that applies to policy, design, and social justice to address current and future environmental issues generated by the ever-increasing impact of climate change.

Earth Week: “Beyond the Polar Bear” Artwork Exhibition

Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 11:00 am to 3:00 pm
Event Café, University Center
63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003

Visit this pop-up exhibition of student, faculty, and alumni work reflecting on the threat of climate change in our lives.

Since its launch in the spring of 2016, Beyond The Polar Bear, a collaboration between The New School and 350.org has captured the imagination of over eighty artists; students, faculty members and alumni from The New School and Parsons School of Design. Of the 142 works submitted, 80 visual expressions are assembled, comprised of gifs, video, memes, diptychs and single images dedicated to interpret the issue of climate change from an intimate perspective. The projected exhibition of works and brief summary of the project will be shared by coordinator and Parsons’ Illustration Assistant Professor, Wendy Popp.

This event is supported by the Tishman Environment and Design Center.