Description:

Please join us for lunch and conversation about safety, risk and accountability with Kaplan Artist-in-Residence John Preus and RTVF Faculty Laura Kipnis.

John Preus is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and the Fall 2016 Kaplan Humanities Institute Artist-in-Residence. During his residencey, John is exploring the division between public and private life and our material expressions of such in preparation for an on-campus art installation.

Laura Kipnis is a celebrated writer, artist, feminist, and professor in the Radio/Television/Film department at Northwestern.

Lunch will be provided.

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In Preus's 2014 solo exhibition, The Beast, at the Hyde Park Art Center — listed among the best Chicago art projects of 2014 by critic Lori Waxman — he speculated on the concept of "safe space" and the relationship between risk and collectivity: "What a stunning history from architecture as a site for sacrificing children and virgins and burying them under the foundations for good fortune, and safe spaces for the vulnerable and marginalized. Clearly much progress has been made but the pendulum seems to have swung too far the other way. Risk aversion, liability regulations, and market forces are deadening public space and the necessarily experimental nature of pubic life"

In Against Love: A Polemic, Kipnis writes, "How can you not admire a system so effective at swallowing all alterna­tives to itself that it can make something as abject as "work­ing for love" sound admirable?…or more to our point, if private life in post-industrialism means that relationships now take work too, if love is the latest form of alienated labor, would rereading Capital as a marriage manual be the most appropriate response?"