Caroline A. Jones
Caroline Jones teaches contemporary art and theory
in the History, Theory, and Criticism Section of the Department of
Architecture at MIT. She received an A.B. in Fine Arts from
Harvard-Radcliffe in 1977, and worked in the museum field for many
years, serving as an administrator at The Museum of Modern Art in New
York, and Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs at the Harvard
University Art Museums. After completing masters degree work at New
York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, she received an MA from
Stanford University, where she also completed her PhD degree in 1992 .
Producer/director of two documentary films and curator of many
exhibitions, her books include major museum publications, such as
Modern Art at Harvard (Abbeville, 1985) and Bay Area Figurative Art,
1950-1965 (University of California Press, 1990), the award-winning
Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist
(University of Chicago Press, 1996/98), and the co-edited volume
Picturing Science, Producing Art (Routledge, 1999). Her most recent
book, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses, was recently published by the
University of Chicago Press; for the MIT List Visual Art Center she
edited the forthcoming Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and
Contemporary Art. During the 2005-06 academic year she was Professeur
invité at the Institute national d’histoire de l’art
in Paris, where she was conducting research on global exhibitions for
her next project, titled Desires for the World Picture.
“Artist / Office / System / Server”
The widespread influence of systems theory may have peaked in an
obvious way in the 1970s with the "Live System" work of Hans Haacke and
others, but its origins and impact extend further in both directions.
This paper will begin from studies of bureaucratized sensory regimes in
mid-century modernism, and will examine some manifestations of
systems-thinking (as in, for example, Buckminster Fuller) to question
how these models are currently active today in "relational" practices
(Tiravanija, Eliasson, et al.). Bureaucracy was the first critique of
monarchic centralized power; how have its ethics and procedures
continued to inspire the server/user mode of contemporary art?
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