Professor Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University
University College - Room 140

Form and Pressure: Four Artists of Today

March 24th - Anri Sala
March 25th - Charles Ray
March 26th - Joseph Marioni
March 27th - Douglas Gordon

In his Alexander Lectures, entitled FORM AND PRESSURE, Michael Fried will discuss the work of four contemporary artists whose respective projects strike him as exemplary for their unfashionable combination of passion, intelligence, and seriousness.  The artists are Anri Sala (video), Charles Ray (sculpture), Joseph Marioni (painting), and Douglas Gordon (video projections, altered films, photographs).  Fried's larger claim will be that the work of all four artists, while not precisely high modernist in orientation, nevertheless engages directly with issues and problems that modernist painting and sculpture made central to artistic creation.  In that sense Fried will be offering a distinctly post- (or rather anti-) post-modernist reading of the current situation.

Reception in UC room 240 immediately following first lecture on March 24th.

Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, is an art critic, art historian, and poet.  He is the author of numerous books on modern art, most recently WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS AS ART AS NEVER BEFORE, to be published in the fall of 2008 by the Yale University Press.