Conférence - Daniel Sherer

Dialectics of Impurity. Architecture as Framing Device and Unstable Signifier in Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s Heidi and Some Recent Installation Practices (1992-2024)

This talk will have two parts which focus on the trajectories of architectural representation in contemporary installation art from the 1990s to the present.
In the first, we will examine the contest between the drive to purity characteristic of modernist architecture and art and the poetics of debasement and dirt in a key work of 1990s' installation art, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy's Heidi (1992).
In the second part, we will explore recent installation practices by a number of English, American, and European artists including Simon Starling, Mike Nelson, Jeremy Deller, Alex da Corte, Stefan Knauf and Mariona Berenguer.What these disparate practices have in common is a shared, if variable reception of Kelley and McCarthy's use of architecture as a framing device for novel readings of the dialectics of impurity and the shifting position of crisis-ridden modern subjectivities.

***

Dr. Daniel Sherer (PhD Harvard 2000) is Visiting Lecturer in architectural history and theory at Princeton University School of Architecture. He has taught at Columbia GSAPP, Cooper Union, Cornell AAP, Harvard GSD, and Yale SoA. His areas of research include Italian Renaissance and Baroque Architecture; Modern Architecture in Europe and the USA; modern receptions of humanist architecture; Italian modern architecture and its interactions with art and design; modern architecture and film; historiography and theory, with an emphasis on Manfredo Tafuri. He translated Tafuri's Ricerca del Rinascimento: Principi, Città, Architetti (1992) into English (Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (Yale U. P. 2006)), and won the Sir Nikolaus Pevsner Book Award  for this translation in that year.
Dr. Sherer has published widely in European and American journals including AA Files, Artforum, Art Journal, Assemblage, Domus, Journal of Architecture, JSAH, Log, Perspecta, Potlatch, Vesper, and Zodiac. He curated the exhibition "Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous` City," at Princeton SoA (2018). In 2022-23 he was Visiting Professor in Architectural History and Theory at the Iuav, University of Venice, Dipartimento Cultura del Progetto. In 2025 he will be Visiting Professor at the University of Ferrara School of Architecture.